“Oh my god! You have become so Americanized”: Paradoxes of adaptation and strategic ambiguity among female immigrant faculty

Walking on Gender Tightrope With Multiple Marginalities

“…The participants' contradictory perceptions of two interrelated concepts, gender blindness and gender advantage in STEM, call for a critical scholarly discussion. While the "genderblind/colorblind" perspective of international female professionals in STEM has been reported in previous studies (Chen & Lawless, 2018;Dutta, 2015), scholars have thus far failed to enact a meaningful interpretation of this puzzling phenomenon. There seems little doubt that the participants' contradictory endorsement of genderblind program environment and gender advantage was largely shaped by the traumatic memory of gender discrimination back in their homeland and their continuing vulnerability in their current STEM graduate programs.…”

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“…O procedimento de definição destes macrotemas levou em conta, portanto, os elementos textuais observáveis, mas também os elementos sistematicamente mitigados ou invisíveis, que são tão ou mais relevantes para as práticas discursivas. Deste modo, interligámos os padrões textuais com a influência dos discursos sociais dominantes (Chen e Lawless 2018). As autoras coparticiparam ativamente na construção dos temas e macrotemas.…”

Immigrant academic mothers negotiating ideal worker and mother norms during the COVID-19 pandemic: Duoethnography as a co-mentoring tool for transformative learning

“…Living in a foreign country adds another layer of challenge to women’s struggle with work–life balance as they have to adapt to different ways of mothering and working in a new cultural environment ( Bonizzoni, 2014 ; Vesely et al, 2019 ). While studies on intercultural adaptation of immigrant professors in the United States have shed light on their sociocultural experiences ( Chen and Lawless, 2018 ; Skachkova, 2007 ), the literature is silent about how the different cultural norms of parenting, working, and gender roles can further complicate an immigrant mother’s pursuit of work–life balance in academia. The opening excerpts illustrate the immense sense of guilt and anxiety experienced by us as immigrant mothers in higher education in the United States (the authors of this study) while trying to perform academic and parenting work at home during the pandemic.…”