This article investigates the mid-career realities of female professionals in male-dominated industrial sectors by way of two explorative company case studies, located in the IT and energy supplier industry in Switzerland. Based on preliminary results taken from qualitative interviews, we analyze career politics of female professionals trying to cope with career boundaries in the context of male-affected management cultures. Career politics, such as pursuing calculated relationships with organizational gatekeepers, are part of a more or less conscious game, with the male order trying to compensate disadvantages in gaining access to career-relevant resources. But as an unintended side effect, they contribute to the reproduction of gendered stereotypes and career boundaries in 'male professions'. Ceci n'est pas une carrière or: The difficult reconciliation of career and female professionals in part-time positions I n 1987, the Swiss university lecturers Peter Noll and Hans-Rudolf Bachmann published a short, but successful satirical self-help manual of Machiavellian strategies for career advancement (Noll and Bachmann, 2004). Their most important commandment was very simple: if you want to advance in your career, don't be a woman! Looking at the make-up of top management circles of many Swiss companies today, 30 years later, most managers seem to have followed their suggestion: they still aren't women. However, the continued under-representation of women in upper management positions should not hide the fact that opportunities for them to pursue qualified careers have improved considerably over the period (cf. Baumgartner, 2008, p. 125). The reasons for the increasing presence of women in salaried employment are, among others, the tertiarization and intensification of knowledge in the workplace, coupled with increasing levels of education and qualification among women and a pressing lack of specialists and academically trained personnel in many industries. Swiss women are comparatively well-represented in the working population: about 62 per cent of the female population above the age of 15 is in salaried employment (BFS, 2010). Sixty per cent of them work in part-time positions searching for financial independence, 'enjoyment' and self-fulfilment in their work; in short, fulfilment in both their work and private lives (Baumgartner, 2008, p. 292). Even a majority of working mothers perceive their multiple roles and responsibilities rather as expansion and enrichment, than as an additional burden (Baumgartner, 2008, p. 229).
