The purpose of this collaborative qualitative study was to investigate the lived experience of women leaders in South Korean companies who manage their work and life and develop their leadership in the face of organizational and cultural constraints. Critical to this investigation was the understanding of three concepts represented in the literature on women in leadership: cultural context, work-life balance, and leadership development. A team of eight researchers conducted a collaborative qualitative study to interview 50 women leaders using a purposeful and snowball sampling method. As a result, we found that women leaders experience difficulties in work-life balance and leadership development largely due to a gendered workplace. By gendered workplace we mean frequent drinking after work, the exclusion of women leaders from informal networking, and a lack of developmental opportunities. The gendered workplace forced them to sacrifice their personal lives in order to work long hours and develop their own strategies for work-life balance. We also found that there were noticeable differences in their narratives by position (28 team leaders and 22 executives) and marital status (37 married and 13 singles) concerning family support, major challenges, definitions of success, leadership styles, and mentors. Based on the study findings, we provided implications for research and practice and the study limitations.

Sturges, 1999). Men's objective career success is defined by verifiable attainments (e.g., promotions), while women's subjective career success is defined by internal criteria (e.g., worklife balance). Women's careers are considerably more complicated than men's due to barriers imposed by gendered social contexts, so women experience competing priorities for their time and attention across career stages (Mainiero and Sullivan, 2005; O'Neil et al., 2008). However, we are unsure if the study findings are applicable to a different context. Problem Statement Research on career success in a South Korean (Korean, hereafter) context presented similar findings to the western literature: men aim for more objective career success and women for subjective career success. Kim's (2004) study of Korean women employees in a large bank showed that for women, intrinsic aspects were more important determinants of career success than objective measures. In a survey of 260 Korean workers, Kim and Cha (2014) presented 11 dimensions that Korean workers defined as career success including: learning/experience,

Embracing diversity and intersectionality in an organization is complex, but the authors discuss the importance of doing so by reflecting on the investigation of mentoring practices in programmatic assessment.