Women's pathways to leadership: A bibliometric review and qualitative inquiry into career progression in Turkey

This paper explores the complicated journeys of women employees from recruitment to top executive leadership positions. Based on the adult translation theory, it examines the processes by which they achieved career breakthroughs and the strategies they used to mitigate barriers. This paper combines two research approaches: bibliometric review and qualitative inquiry. For the bibliometric review, we examined 225 documents related to the process of women's career advancement toward leadership. The analysis results indicate two significant trends and two research gaps. In the second part, we employed qualitative inquiry to collect and analyze the experiences of 20 women leaders in Turkey. Through a phenomenological approach, this study identified four iterative dimensions in the process of each participant's pursuit of a leadership position in her career. While many existing studies contribute to the understanding of barriers women encounter in workplaces, this study, through a process perspective, portrays women's journey in achieving their desired career goals. Implications for organization managers and HR professionals are provided regarding career equality and women's career advancement.