Performing Professional Persona on WhatsApp: Gendered Self-Presentation and Authority Negotiation among Saudi Women at Work

Drawing on Goffman’s concept of persona as a strategic and situational performance, the study examines written responses elicited through guided workplace scenarios designed to simulate high-stakes professional interaction on WhatsApp. The study adopted a qualitative, interpretive, discourse-pragmatic research design. The sample of the study included 30 women and 10 men employed in academic or administrative roles at the University of Bisha, and data were collected through semi‑structured, DCT‑style guided written prompts tailored to WhatsApp communication. Findings outlined three recurring persona patterns in women’s responses which are not interpreted as individual communication styles, but as systematic and adaptive responses to the risks associated with visibility, authority negotiation, and epistemic credibility in digitally mediated professional environments. The findings support the idea that WhatsApp functions as a high-stakes professional space in which message persistence, visibility, and audience multiplicity intensify the consequences of linguistic choice, making persona management a continuous and labor-intensive process. The study contributes to discourse-pragmatic research on digital professionalism by foregrounding persona as a key analytical lens for understanding authority, credibility, and communicative burden in contemporary workplaces.