**2. Literature Review**

To better understand the impacts that the COVID-19 pandemic has had on women's career trajectories, it is important to examine the conditions and structures that shaped their careers before the pandemic. Even though women have made strides from generations past, they still face many obstacles in developing careers, and especially in moving into career roles with increased compensation and prominence. It is not true that no woman can ever be granted a top position in an organization. Rather, it is more the case that women generally experience more barriers to advancement than men. Eagly and Carli [13] likened this scenario to navigating a labyrinth: women are trying to advance, but they constantly run into blockages along the way. Thus, while women are not overtly blocked from career advancement, not many women surmount the barriers and advance to higher positions [14–16].

Research has shown that women have made career strides in recent generations and that more women are in positions of leadership than in previous generations. There is also evidence that women make effective leaders [17,18] and that their leadership approaches tend to be more transformational in nature than men's. Yet, despite the gains that women have made in career development and their occupation of more leadership positions, there has been consistent discussion of the barriers they face in career advancement [19,20]. In fact, many authors [21] have written about how professional cultures often do not support women at the level that they need in order to rise in responsibility and leadership. Women face many barriers to their career development [13,22,23]. One key barrier is women's socialization to traditional gender roles, which encourages them to focus more on family caretaking—and encourages others to expect that of them—than on career and professional development outside the home. In addition to gender role socialization into family caretaking, women also face a potential bias against them in that they are often viewed as less competent than men. Years of theoretical development and research have supported the notion of gendered status value beliefs, where in mixed-sex interactions, women are often perceived and treated, albeit often unconsciously, as less competent than men [24–26]. Thus, not only are women more socialized to see themselves in the home and family sphere, but they also may be perceived to be generally less competent than men.

These perceptions and practices may somewhat explain why women are not often seen as leaders by decision makers in organizations—most often by men—which leads to women being overlooked for promotions and increased compensation opportunities in the workplace [27,28]. The literature on gender roles and leadership has consistently argued that leadership is often seen as a gendered concept [13,16,22,29,30] and that leadership roles have been normatively filled by men [31,32]. Biases against seeing women in leadership roles may explain why many women face challenges as they attempt to progress in their careers [22,33].

Among other evidence supporting the notion of gendered leadership is the lack of programs targeted towards helping women advance to higher ranks and greater leadership responsibilities [27,34]. Some of the literature has also argued that leadership training is often targeted and designed to cater to men, and not as helpful in helping women advance [35]. Other researchers cited shortages of networks and sponsorship opportunities for women [21–23,36]. These barriers, along with bias in hiring, compensation, and promotion opportunities, may stymie women's advances towards greater levels of career success.

A related challenge that women face in advancing their careers is the difficulty of balancing the expectations of their professional lives with family responsibilities, particularly with the continued lack of family-friendly policies and practices in organizations today. Some of the literature has discussed the incompatibility of work expectations with family life [37–40]. Further, Deming [37] found that women often face a penalty for having families because they feel a need to cut back on hours to meet family obligations, which prevents them from career progression. There is also a perceived "flexibility stigma" against workers who need flexible or part-time work arrangements to balance family obligations, which has been demonstrated to hold such workers back from promotion and advancement opportunities [41–43]. Thus, the conscious and unconscious notion of what an "ideal worker" looks like continues to permeate organizational cultures around the world, and caretakers, who are more often women, cannot easily fulfill this preferred workplace role expectation [44].

Barriers have been well documented in the literature for years, indicating that the norms of organizations that employ women have been slow to shift. It is important to consider deeply the potential reasons for continued impediments. While some organizations have made changes in order to help advance women, the question remains as to why such barriers remain pervasive. Two psychological theories may help illuminate the answer.

Identity theory, especially as Stryker conceptualizes it, addresses the question regarding systemic inequalities for women in the workplace [38,45,46]. Identity theory suggests that people have complex identities and that a single person can often identify with multiple roles. For example, a person may maintain the roles of a friend, a parent, a spouse, and a worker. Stryker's identity theory suggests that the social expectations and social networks surrounding individuals may make some identity roles more salient [38,45,46]. In considering systemic gender inequality in the workplace, one could infer that many working mothers might be drawn to identify more closely with the parent role over the worker role, both because of how they have been socialized and because of the present expectations of their social networks. Men, as a whole, due to similar reasons, may be more drawn to the worker role than the parent role. Thus, without large-scale changes to these social expectations and reinforcement of those changes, men may tend to focus singularly on work roles more than women do, which can translate into greater advancement and compensation opportunities for men in the longer term. In contrast, women who have children may feel less inclined to focus on the worker role because of the social expectations and networks that reinforce their connection to parenting roles [38].

Another relevant psychological theory is the systems psychodynamic approach [47–49]. While traditional psychodynamic theory focuses on the unconscious desires and motivations that shape the behavior of individuals, systems psychodynamic theory brings this conceptualization from the microsphere into the mesosphere, where unconscious desires and motivations shape the behaviors of people within organizations. Systems psychodynamic theory has offered explanations of how and why gender inequality might persist in the

workplace [48]. For example, it has long been a norm in many professional organizations to value workers who are willing to place a singular focus on work tasks and devote themselves to their professional lives, putting in long hours without interference from family or other outside issues. This model of a desirable 'ideal worker' [44] fits with men's general socialization into a traditional gender role of provider, which, as noted in the discussion of identity theory above, might be a more salient role for them than other roles. Thus, men may generally feel more comfortable in the worker role and have unconscious desires to maintain the system as is, with organizational structures that favor men's success as the status quo [48].

Organizations that have been more traditionally developed and led by men socialized into a traditional gender role and 'ideal worker model' often recognize the need to retain women and may institute some family-friendly work-life balance policies, such as flexible schedules, job sharing, and/or reduced hours to help women succeed, but yet maintain norms, such as the previously mentioned 'flexibility stigma' [41–43], that prevent this from happening. Indeed, systems psychodynamic theory suggests that because of potential unconscious fear of disrupting the status quo, bias exists against such flexible policies, meaning that those who do not use them (i.e., mostly men) would more likely be rewarded over those who do [48,50], which helps explain the persistence of a 'flexibility stigma'. For example, an organization could offer flexible schedules as a family-friendly policy, but their utilization is dependent on a gender's socialized role. Women use flexible scheduling to fulfil their socialized parent role while men choose not to utilize flexible scheduling to fulfil their socialized worker role. An unconscious bias that values the singular focus toward work (which more men fulfil by opting out of a flexible scheduling policy) means less promotion of women who choose to take advantage of the flexible scheduling policy, thus promoting the continuation of a 'flexibility stigma', and further enshrining inequality [15,38,48].

Even when men take advantage of flexible work policies, they may be more inclined to use them towards fitting into the optimal worker role rather than truly moving towards work–life balance. Indeed, a study from the United Kingdom [51] found that when schedule control was given as an option, men and unmarried women used the schedule control option to work more, while women with families used it more for work–life balance. Even though these biases may exist at an individual level, the collection of individuals that make up organizations can shape the policies and practices that continue them. Thus, without individuals recognizing these biases and collectively working to push for an overall change in the culture and expectation of what it means to be an optimal worker, flexible policies may continue to exacerbate workplace gender inequalities.

Overall, though policies may be in place ostensibly to help women succeed and balance work–family life, factors such as entrenched social identities and potential unconscious dynamics may urge actors to maintain the status quo, and result in persisting gender inequality in the workplace [42,48]. Despite efforts to facilitate women's success, an overarching system endures—informed by a collection of biases on the individual level in which discrimination against women may not be overt in professional settings, yet barriers remain that prevent too many women from advancing in their careers. Some have suggested that the larger culture, again made up collectively of individuals, that reinforces socialization tendencies is the element that needs to change [33]. Unfortunately, not enough traction has been made thus far to make significant inroads in this endeavor.

The aforementioned barriers and dynamics informed existing workplace structures when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020. Suddenly, workers were being asked to stay home. Schools were closed, and there was an extensive blurring of lines between work and home responsibilities. Multiple studies have indicated that women have, by and large, borne more of the brunt of this sudden shift than men [11,37,40,52]. Women covered more of the childcare and attended to more of the parenting roles during the pandemic, which pulled their focus and attention from work responsibilities. In contrast, men's careers were not as strongly impacted by remote work. The implication was that remote work actually enabled men to see greater success [11].

One explanation for the gendered pattern of professional workplace experience during the pandemic could be that women, consistent with identity theory, prioritized the parenting role over the work role, consistent with what their socialization and social networks expected of them [38,45,46] and what they expect of themselves. In contrast, men may have utilized remote work to prioritize the worker role. Thus, as was described previously, even with flexible policies that may have been in place, unconscious motivations to maintain the status quo and current identity socialization practices may have reinforced men and women in prioritizing worker and parenting roles, respectively, which may have exacerbated conditions of workplace gender inequality during the pandemic [47–49]. The study described in this report will dig deeper into the phenomena highlighted in this literature review with a goal of investigating and illuminating how the pandemic affected women's career advancement experiences and opportunities during the pandemic.
