Climbing through gender workplace bias: exploring how women navigate barriers to career advancement

Advancing in professional careers is often compared to climbing a ladder. Starting at the bottom rung, each promotion represents a step to the next rung until the top rung is reached. Unfortunately, for many women, the initial steps on the career ladder may be broken by obstacles, such as workplace gender bias and stereotypes. Women entering professional careers often encounter invisible barriers that hinder career advancement, often referred to as the broken rung on the corporate “ladder.” Women’s career advancement is often shaped by workplace gender bias that creates barriers early in the leadership pipeline. Guided by dynamics discrimination theory (DDT) and informed by social cognitive career theory (SCCT) and career self-management (CSM), this mixed-methods study examined how workplace gender bias, relationship awareness, and leader-member exchange (LMX) shaped women’s career advancement, career satisfaction, and career aspirations across career stages. Study 1 used a quantitative survey design to examine the relationship among perceived workplace bias, relational resources, emotional intelligence (EI), and LMX, and women’s career outcomes. The findings indicated that perceived workplace bias was negatively associated with women’s career advancement and career satisfaction. At the same time, the relational resources, EI, and LMX were positively related to these outcomes, with LMX demonstrating the stronger additive contribution. Study 2 utilized interviews with 17 professional women in middle and late career stages to qualitatively extend these findings. The qualitative findings identified three major themes: Aspiration Evolution, Career Navigation, and Workplace Context. Together, these themes suggest that women’s career aspirations were not fixed but evolved through ongoing recalibration, strategic navigation, and interpretation of workplace context. Taken together, the two studies suggest that women’s career outcomes are shaped not only by structural barriers but also by relational resources and by how women interpret, respond to, and navigate workplace bias over time.