Permission to Rise: Self‐Permission and Career Resilience for Women

ABSTRACT Women remain underrepresented in leadership and are more likely than men to reduce their workforce participation or step back from their careers, particularly when navigating caregiving responsibilities. Although these aggregate gender differences motivate the present study, our goal is not to explain differences between women and men directly. Rather, we aim to understand the variation among women that may help explain those broader patterns. Existing research has identified numerous structural barriers, resilience resources, and identity tensions that shape women's careers. Yet, less attention has been devoted to understanding why women facing similar circumstances often respond differently. We conducted semi‐structured interviews with 87 college‐educated women in the United States, supplemented with a second phase of 26 interviews conducted more than a decade later. We observed a recurring evaluative process through which women assessed whether pursuing ambitious career goals was personally legitimate despite competing gendered expectations. We conceptualize this process as career self‐permission: an attitudinal orientation reflecting the extent to which individuals perceive pursuing, prioritizing, and advancing their career goals as legitimate and worthy of investment. Our findings suggest that career self‐permission helps explain variation in women's career resilience beyond established antecedents such as ambition, self‐efficacy, and optimism. Rather than altering the objective nature of gendered career stressors, career self‐permission appears to change how those stressors are interpreted, enabling some women to define their careers according to self‐determined rather than externally prescribed expectations. This perspective extends career resilience theory by introducing a cognitive evaluative mechanism through which women navigate gendered career challenges and suggests practical approaches for fostering women's career resilience.