Campus Location
Dallas Campus (Online)
Date of Award
3-2026
Document Type
Dissertation
Department
Organizational Leadership
Degree Name
Doctor of Education
Committee Chair or Primary Advisor
Kristine Quade
Second Committee Member or Secondary Advisor
Marisa Beard
Third Committee Member or Committee Reader
Julie McElhany
Abstract
In spite of the promotion of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education and careers, there is a lack of women entering the STEM workforce and majoring in STEM subjects. Women can experience gender bias and workplace marginalization in STEM careers, but have learned coping strategies that have contributed to their technology career resilience. The purpose of this narrative qualitative study was to explore how women working as individual performers and leaders in technology companies told their career stories of resilience through the perspective of change acceptance, confidence, and communication, three factors in Kumar’s CR8 model of resilience. The model served as the theoretical foundation for the study. Research questions were aligned with the resilience model and asked how women use change acceptance, confidence, and communication to persist in their careers. Using semistructured interviews, data were collected from nine participants working in technology companies with operations in North Texas. Plot analysis was used to analyze the data and determine synergies among the study’s participants’ quotes from interview transcripts. Synergistic quotes were grouped and yielded the following as contributors to women’s resilience: mentoring and support networks were valuable sources of resilience; change acceptance impacted participants’ individual and team resilience; confidence correlated to mental toughness; and communication was related to women’s resilience and team resilience, as women used effective and empathetic communication.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Baldridge, Gina J., "A Narrative Study on the Resilience of Women in Technology Careers" (2026). Digital Commons @ ACU, Electronic Theses and Dissertations. Paper 998.
https://digitalcommons.acu.edu/etd/998