Holding on and Letting Go: Ambivalent Responses to Career Shocks among Professional Women during the COVID‐19 Pandemic

ABSTRACT Career shocks have emerged as a critical lens through which to examine disrupted career trajectories in times of crisis. While a growing body of scholarship has acknowledged their role in shaping career paths, less attention has been paid to the emotional and cognitive tensions they provoke across life domains. In particular, the interplay between career disruptions and family dynamics remains underexplored. This study addressed this gap by integrating career shock theory with ambivalence theory to investigate how professional women experienced and made sense of being furloughed during the COVID‐19 pandemic. Drawing on 35 in‐depth interviews with women temporarily dismissed during Israel's second national lockdown, we examined how participants navigated the disruption of their professional and familial roles. Our findings revealed that furloughs were frequently experienced as a source of ambivalence, simultaneously perceived as a threat to career progression and an opportunity for reflection or reorientation. Participants also had ambivalent responses to their changing family roles, as they navigated increased caregiving responsibilities and experienced renewed engagement at home. We identified four patterns of coping with these tensions: work–family avoidance, family dominance, work dominance, and work–family holism. This study contributes to career theory by advancing a novel integrative framework that highlights ambivalence as a key dimension of career shocks, offering new insights into how individuals actively negotiate paradoxical demands in disrupted contexts.