Executive women in private sector: Subjectivity, gender and experience

This study discusses how the womanhood of women executives in the private sector in Turkey is reconstructed by their own power deployed against the power they encounter in daily business life, which varies by women's generation, class, status and level of education; and by relationships established with other individuals through an analysis of the women's individual experiences and accounts. While the study examines the experiences of women who have climbed the glass staircase and broken through the glass ceiling through their active participation in the process of constructing their subjectivity and their definitions of success; it also aims to understand how their work life is reflected on their domestic and social lives. Another aim of the study is to reveal how women executives define power and their strategies and tactics for dealing with the surveillance and challenges imposed to them. The study focuses on the narratives of 21 women executives working in the private sector collected through semi-structured in-depth interviews and was designed as a qualitative study which is based on feminist methodology, applying narrative analysis to the collected qualitative data. Unlike previous studies on working women, the challenges these women experience in working life and emotional labor, this study focuses on women who are at the core of the executive level, which is considered a field of power and examines their understanding of success and power, processes of communication with other individuals in daily life, the role of class in their life struggle; as well as how their domestic and social lives reflect commonalities and differences with other women based on comparisons of status, educational level and culture expressed in their accounts.