Langinier, Hélène

All that she wants: the role of cultural gender norms, career and family for professional migrant women in the Big Four - 2023.


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This article seeks to understand how cultural gender norms influence the possibility for professional migrant women arriving from Asia and Eastern Europe to take on an active role in the professional sphere of the Big Four accounting firms. For this purpose, we interviewed forty women and their supervisors, all of whom of different nationalities and working in the Big Four in Luxembourg. This highly multicultural and competitive organizational context demands levels of personal investment that are often very difficult to reconcile with family life. We draw on intersectionality as multilevel analysis (Winker and Degele 2011) to reveal that the arrival of these women in Luxembourg is marked by the intersection of cultural gender norms with their familial and hierarchical status and their motivations to migrate. This interplay explains their ability to distance themselves from their individual cultural gender norms, thus enabling them to apply themselves in the professional sphere. This work contributes to the literature on female careers by highlighting that gender social norms, combined with a number of other factors, can positively influence the careers of professional migrant women.