The Makeshift Careers of Women in Malawi: Neither Traditional Nor Flexible

Abstract

Through qualitative research into the career experiences of two groups of Malawian professional women, this article reveals the value of expanding research into women’s careers to the global south. Although displaying elements of western-focused traditional and new career models, these women’s careers did not conform to either. Instead, due to heavy family responsibilities for both care and breadwinning, including for the extended family, and faced with inflexible human resource practices, their careers were mostly characterised by serial compromises necessary to maintain full-time continuous employment while dealing with life events and workplace setbacks. These accommodations to the realities of their complicated lives often resulted in second-best, far-from-ideal solutions. This career form, conceptualised here as a makeshift career, extends career models to fit the Malawian context and the global south but also expands conceptual understandings of women’s careers in ways also applicable to the north.

Introduction

Academic debates on careers reflect research mainly developed in western economies. However, people’s careers are strongly influenced by their underlying societal contexts (Rodrigues et al., 2016; Xian and Woodhams, 2008), so how well these models apply to non-western countries is unclear. Several authors have called for context-based career studies (Ganrose, 2007; Sullivan, 1999). Sullivan and Baruch (2009: 1562) considered that:

studies of workers in non-western countries that recognise the economic and societal influences on careers are especially important because most of what we know about careers is based on studies conducted in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia, making western models the de facto ‘standard’ against which careers in other countries are compared.

Moreover, although new career concepts (Tomlinson et al., 2018) allow more flexible paths, and thereby are said to better reflect women’s greater concern for work–life articulation, these assumptions derive from the experience of women in some western countries and may overlook the contextual reality of women elsewhere, especially in the global south.

This article addresses these issues through a qualitative study exploring the careers of professional Malawian women. The objective goes beyond using the Malawian study to test a theory from the north and explores if professional women’s career experiences in a global south context could expand conceptual understandings of women’s careers in ways applicable to both the south and the north. This builds on the recognition within work–life balance debates that wider international comparisons help develop more holistic perspectives that enrich understandings in different global contexts (Lewis et al., 2007).

There are strong grounds for expecting the socio-economic context shaping Malawian women’s careers to differ significantly from that influencing their western counterparts. Malawi is among the poorest countries in the world, ranked 183 out of 189 countries by per capita GDP in 2019 (Conceição, 2019). Consequently, any post-colonial male breadwinner ideals are very far from Malawian reality, where women’s earnings are essential for their families’ economic survival and women’s labour force participation rate at 74% well exceeds the OECD’s 65% average rate (World Bank, 2021a). Formal employment accounts for only 6.4% of employed Malawian women ¹ compared with 16.2% of men (Government of Malawi, 2014). However, as most Malawian women are subsistence farmers or informal workers, this is the only group likely to have employment experiences comparable with those for women in the global north. Neither flexible working nor formal childcare is widely available in Malawi (Semu, 2002) and although better paid women may use domestic helpers, they still have significant household and care responsibilities (Kanyongolo, 2011). Domestic tasks are greater in the south because of underdeveloped infrastructure (e.g. lack of running water in some areas) and fewer durable goods. They also extend to support for community activities to maintain traditions (Lewis et al., 2007) and service family events. Furthermore, childcare needs are high, as nearly half the population is under 15 (Index mundi, 2021), partly a result of the AIDS epidemic. Nevertheless, women with a foothold in formal employment are unlikely to ‘opt out’ to provide childcare due to the household’s reliance on their earnings and limited opportunities to ‘opt back in’.

Consequently, the influence of work–family articulation on Malawian women’s career choices is likely to be very different from that experienced by most of their western counterparts. In exploring how careers are shaped in this specific context, the aim is to extend the conceptual range of careers research to capture women’s experiences in the global south and thereby to shed light on the narrowness of current careers concepts even when applied to western societies.

Reviewing current career concepts from a gendered perspective

Career research has moved beyond the traditional organisation-focused linear career model offering regular salary increases and social status to those prioritising work above all else, irrespective of family circumstances (Worthington et al., 2005). Instead, a range of new models are said to provide a better fit with emerging employment trends and societal arrangements. Globalisation, technology and associated restructuring of work and organisations have changed how careers are viewed (Sullivan and Baruch, 2009). The boundaryless careers concept emerged in response to these transformations and perceived reduced employment security within organisations (Arthur and Rousseau, 1996). Equally important, as more women entered employment, the narrow focus on achieving material and status success was reconsidered and greater emphasis placed on individual psychological assessments of career goals. The protean career model suggests that women, particularly those with care responsibilities, may seek to self-craft their careers rather than follow linear organisationally defined paths (Cabrera, 2009; Hall, 1996), while the kaleidoscope career concept (Mainiero and Sullivan, 2006) suggests that women may prioritise values other than material success at particular life stages. According to these approaches, women may design careers on their own terms and have their own value-based success measures (Cabrera, 2009).

However, even in the western context, critics argue the transformation to new career forms has been exaggerated, with organisation-based careers remaining important and most people’s preferred arrangement (Elchardus and Smits, 2008; King et al., 2005; Rodrigues and Guest, 2010; Tomlinson et al., 2018). Furthermore, evidence for flexible careers, whether protean, boundary-crossing or kaleidoscopic, is far from universal, with full-time continuous careers more the norm for women in, for example, Finland, Portugal and several eastern European countries (Niemistö et al., 2021; Sánchez-Mira and O’Reilly, 2019). This may apply even more in most post-colonial developing countries, where employment opportunities are limited and material needs high (Mokomane, 2014), so that opting out or working part-time may be neither desirable nor possible even though formal childcare and leave policies may be underdeveloped. Full-time continuous working among women is not necessarily linked to adequate parental leave and childcare support whether in developed or developing economies (Ruivo et al., 1998). This suggests that more attention should be paid to diverse societal contexts in shaping women’s career trajectories than to theories emphasising women’s values and self-agency. Malawian women’s trajectories may not conform fully to either traditional or contemporary career models but could display elements of both and/or features of their own.

While contextual influences vary across countries, women’s employment careers everywhere are marked by inequalities in both the family and in employment. Women’s disproportional responsibilities in the home sphere mean that work–life articulation considerations play a greater role in women’s career decisions compared with men’s (Crompton, 2006; Mokomane, 2014). This greater need to accommodate work to home life places women at a labour market disadvantage, partly explaining their lower earnings, which in turn reinforce the gender-unequal division of domestic labour within heterosexual couples (Fagan and O’Reilly, 1998). Proponents of protean and kaleidoscope models present non-traditional paths as opportunities to exercise free-agency in self-crafting careers that are more driven by work–life balance issues and personal values, with limited attention paid to materialistic values and needs, including breadwinning pressures. There is, therefore, insufficient acknowledgement that women’s choice of flexible careers is not only a result of gender inequalities in care responsibilities and in employment opportunities but also itself results in gender inequalities by lowering pay over the life cycle.

The risks of pursuing flexible careers may be higher in developing countries due to limited job opportunities. Even in a western context, the boundaryless career model exaggerates inter-organisational mobility. Decisions to cross organisational, industry and occupational boundaries are found to be significantly influenced by costs and risk factors as well as gender and family circumstances (Rodrigues et al., 2016). Family constraints on mobility may also be stronger where gender relations are more traditional.

Compared with the traditional career model, kaleidoscope and protean models are more sensitive to women’s work–life articulation needs but have been criticised for exaggerating individual agency and downplaying the institutional conditions, cultural norms and organisational practices that limit women’s choices, even in developed countries (Tomlinson et al., 2018). Moreover, the debate on work–life articulation and work–life conflict (see Crompton, 2006) regards life pressures as emanating mostly from domestic and care commitments. However, women in developing economies may face more challenging family contexts where the main pressure is to undertake wage work even when care and domestic burdens are also high. Work–life articulation debates play down breadwinning pressures but African authors have observed how in developing societies paid employment is not seen as competing with care but as part of it, as a means of enhancing family welfare (Mokomane, 2014). Even in a western context, Schmidt (2017) suggests that women’s employment can be interpreted as a form of care if women see it as breadwinning to provide for the family’s material needs and secure their (economic) well-being, rather than as the pursuit of self-interested career objectives.

Debates on career versus care implicitly assume that women have options to reduce or even give up their work commitments but where welfare support for life events (e.g. divorce or a partner’s unemployment, early death, illness or disability) is limited, the risks of opting-out of organisational careers increase. Dual-earning protects households against these economic risks (Smith et al., 2013) and women may not have significant choice, even when jobs involve long hours and travel (Hewlett and Luce, 2006), but to try to fulfil both work and domestic demands. Without a new ‘reproductive bargain’ (Pearson, 2014: 34), where the state provides services to lessen care burdens, women in developing economies may have little option other than performing this double shift.

The kaleidoscope career model identifies various pull (mainly family and care) and push (mainly discrimination and lack of advancement) factors that may interact to create interrupted non-linear trajectories (Mainiero and Sullivan, 2006). Women at childrearing life stages are presented as emphasising balance. However, the term balance has been critiqued for implying an idea of harmony that obscures both the complexities, dilemmas and compromises involved in women’s strategies to manage competing work and family demands and the contextual forces that shape these strategies (Crompton, 2006; Lewis et al., 2007). ² Moreover, despite acknowledging that these problems force women into alternative flexible paths (Cabrera, 2009), the positive aspects of self-crafted careers are overstressed and the impact of trade-offs and compromises overlooked (Olsen, 2021), namely on objective material success measures including pay and progression.

Moreover, what is overlooked in all these debates is that many women with caring responsibilities do have continuous full-time organisational trajectories in both developed and developing countries. These careers will still be shaped by gender discrimination and work–life articulation, but less is known about how these challenges are managed. Women typically struggle to meet ideal worker expectations due to their disproportional care responsibilities (Cook et al., 2002; Worthington et al., 2005). Furthermore, the ‘culturally prescribed values of individualism and autonomy’ (Worthington et al., 2005: 232) embedded in the traditional career model imply that career decisions first and foremost reflect the employee’s best interest. However, women may be expected and prepared to place their family’s interests ahead of their own, particularly in countries like Malawi where collectivist values are strong (Sulamoyo, 2012). Social expectations on women may include not only fulfilling their domestic and care responsibilities but also providing materially, through employment, for their nuclear and extended families, as is typical in developing country contexts (Annor, 2014; Mokomane, 2014) and to contribute to community activities. Lewis et al.’s (2007) critique of the work–life balance debate points to tensions in developing economies between participating in the modern wage economy and maintaining community traditions. These tensions affect mostly women, who are expected to provide the unpaid labour to keep community traditions alive.

Further challenges for women’s careers emerge from attitudinal and structural barriers to progression (Ridgeway and Correll, 2004; Tlais, 2014) that may be more pronounced in sub-Saharan countries due to limited formal childcare and parental leave, more traditional and patriarchal gender relations and more complex family configurations creating obligations beyond the nuclear family (Annor, 2014; Mokomame, 2014; Semu, 2002). Moreover, organisational cultures and policies may create more challenges for women in developing countries (Jaga et al., 2017; Mokomane, 2014; Mordi et al., 2013). Women’s lower share of formal sector jobs may strengthen gender beliefs in, for example, women’s lower work competence (Ridgeway and Correll, 2004). Women may accept their subordinate status in contexts where keeping a job is vital, but these gender beliefs may also lead women to seek to prove their performance and commitment in the hope of limiting discriminatory effects on their careers. This may present a double challenge if they need to demonstrate competencies while receiving limited employer support for family obligations beyond basic maternity leave. This neglect of family commitments may be reinforced where workplaces are ‘structured around an assumption that all workers have a source of unpaid labour to care for their families, or that they will somehow be able to manage their responsibilities’ (Mokomane, 2014: 8). The scarcity of formal sector jobs may allow employers to pursue policies that are out of kilter with their workforce’s needs and realities. Also in some sub-Saharan countries, colonial legacies in the form of bureaucratic rules may result in family-blind public sector employment policies such as mandatory relocation. For instance, Ntseane (2014) describes how teachers in Botswana are subject to mandatory geographical transfers irrespective of family circumstances.

A major gap thus remains in the literature regarding how women manage the tensions between full-time continuous careers and their social and family obligations. As the analysis below suggests, the idea of compromise must be at the core of a framework for representing women’s careers, especially but not exclusively, in developing countries. Such a focus could help develop a more adequate model that acknowledges how women’s careers are shaped both by gender inequalities and work–life articulation considerations and by the context where they take place.

From this review, three research questions can be identified:

1. In what respects is the Malawian context of family and gender relations and employer policies distinctive and significant in shaping Malawian women’s careers in the formal sector?

2. How do women in this context manage their careers and their work–life articulation in practice, considering both the obstacles and constraints they encounter and the degree of agency they deploy?

3. To what extent can the revealed career patterns and work–life articulation strategies inform the development of an alternative career model more relevant for women in developing (and indeed developed) countries?

Method

Research design and context

This article is based on a qualitative study in Malawi, involving semi-structured interviews with 55 women formally employed in education (31) and financial services (24). These industries, one public and one private sector, were purposively selected for requiring higher education for career entry and employing a relatively high share of women. The Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (MoEST) is an important employer of educated women, accounting for over half of Malawi’s 130,000 civil servants (Chitsulo, 2017) and 99% of all teachers. In 2018, women accounted for 44% of primary teachers and 23% of secondary teachers, well below world averages of 66% and 54%, respectively (World Bank, 2021b, 2021c). Financial services, comprising banking and insurance, is also an important employer of educated women: over 40% of employees have higher education (Durevall and Mussa, 2010) and 45% are female, well above the overall 29% non-agricultural female employment share (Government of Malawi, 2010, 2014).

Moreover, these two sectors service the whole country so that recruitment and promotion opportunities are conditional on willingness to take posts in remote rural areas. Despite these similarities, the sectors have different employment structures and material outcomes. Teaching is a low-paid profession within the formal sector, while financial services offer well-paid employment by Malawian standards. Consistent with the formal employment sector norm in Malawi, neither sector offers part-time working but teaching provides more opportunities for work–family reconciliation due to shorter classroom hours. In financial services, hours are long for both sexes. By taking these two different cases, the research covers both ends of the spectrum of careers available to women in formal employment.

Research process and participants

The interviews were conducted between September 2014 and May 2016 by the first author, in English, except for six conducted in Chichewa. Semi-structured interviews, lasting around one hour, covered themes relating to the women’s employment trajectories, experiences and values, and including the opportunities they had, constraints they faced and choices they made relating to their work and family lives. Most interviews were face-to-face, with only two conducted by telephone. Upon interviewees’ consent, the interviews were digitally recorded and subsequently transcribed.

The potential ethical implications of the research were considered and thoroughly discussed, with steps taken to minimise any potential risks (mostly related to informed consent and confidentiality). Possible effects from the positionality of the three female researchers on the research process were also considered. Their longstanding interest in gender equality framed their choice of topic and research questions while the first author’s position as a Malawian academic (the other two being western academics) and mother influenced the choice of the Malawian context. How the first author/interviewer related to the interviewees and potentially identified with their experiences formed part of the team’s reflection and discussions throughout the research process. While these shared experiences appeared to increase trust, care was taken to counter potential biases. Responses were accepted as given, without being challenged and without introducing the researcher’s views on the issues discussed to avoid her beliefs, values and background (Mason, 2002) influencing research outcomes. This, and reflective discussion between the researchers, minimised the likelihood of introducing any personal biases through the interview process, data analysis and interpretation of findings.

The biographical and family characteristics of the 55 women interviewees were diverse: aged from 20 to 61, the majority (29) were over 40; 31 were married, all with working partners, while four were widowed, five divorced and 15 single/never married. Most were mothers (44) and 23 had children under 14. The education sample included teachers at different schools and levels (primary and secondary) from two of Malawi’s six region-based education divisions. Four organisations were studied in financial services, two from banking and two from insurance (one local and one multinational organisation in each subsector) to allow for differences in careers by subsector and organisational-type. The interviewees (six women from each organisation) were selected from a range of departments and seniority levels.

The interviews were complemented by conversations with human resource (HR) managers in both sectors who provided contextual information on their organisation’s employment and HR practices. Although our analysis draws mainly on the employee interviews, these key informant meetings (seven in education, four in financial services) provided opportunities to contextualise and triangulate the interview data, while facilitating access to potential participants. All parties were assured that participation was voluntary and that the data would be treated confidentially. All interviewees were given fictitious names to protect their identities. Other personal and employer data are withheld for the same reason.

Analysis

A template analysis, which typically combines a top-down deductive approach with a bottom-up inductive approach (King, 2012), was used for coding and organising the interview data. This allowed identification of both elements of existing career models in these Malawian women’s careers and features that were specific to them and to the context where their careers took place. Following King’s (2012) procedure, a template was developed of a priori themes and sub-themes informed by the features of the four main career models (traditional, boundaryless, protean and kaleidoscope), along with themes relating to their family circumstances, their roles as wives and mothers and work–life balance. This was applied in an initial coding of the data. The work–life balance code was renamed as work–life articulation as balance did not seem to be an appropriate description of these women’s experiences in managing competing demands. The template was further developed by adding post hoc themes and sub-themes that emerged from the inductive interrogation of the data. This enabled recurring themes not covered by either traditional or new career models to be identified. These mostly comprised the tensions that the women experienced as well as the trade-offs and compromises that they were required to make. The different types of compromises are discussed in detail in the findings section and inform the concept of ‘makeshift career’ proposed in this article.

The analysis was aided by using the software package NVivo 11, which supported the efficiency and rigour of the qualitative analytical process.

Findings

This section explores the three research questions drawing on the analysed interview material.

Distinctive challenges in the Malawian context

The findings confirmed expectations that studies in the global south could reveal distinctive contextual features that generate greater tensions between the spheres of work, home and community than commonly encountered in the global north.

These exacerbated tensions stemmed first from formal sector employers’ failure to adjust to the reality of dual-earning households within Malawi’s challenging geographical, cultural and gender culture context. The accounts from employee and HR management interviews revealed that the organisational practices in both sectors were very strongly based on the (male) ideal worker who could prioritise work above all other commitments. Working conditions were even less compatible with dual earning than those prevailing in the global north in several respects. First, in both sectors, staff were often required to be geographically mobile at the point of promotion. This is unusual in the West and in Malawi it involved moves to remote areas where transport was problematic and even in urban areas a shortage of formal sector vacancies made mobility difficult.

Second, support for parenthood was even more limited than in the West, though it differed between the sectors: maternity leave in teaching and in three of the financial services firms was 12 weeks but even shorter in the multinational bank at the mandatory eight weeks. While teachers’ classroom hours were often short, in financial services the working hours were long, and further extended by pressure for presenteeism. Consequently, financial services employees had to hire domestic help but teachers normally could not afford adequate domestic support. Neither sector had policies on flexible working, though some interviewees reported ad hoc arrangements often linked to family sickness. Neither set of employers facilitated horizontal moves for family reconciliation; this had been discontinued in teaching as too many wanted to move to urban areas.

Third, promotion systems lacked transparency. Although this is also common in the West, in teaching these problems were exacerbated by very tight public finances, such that even when a vacancy arose many were asked to act up without being offered the actual promotion. Most interviewees felt overlooked for promotion. While most met the eligibility requirements of at least four years’ service in their current post, less than half had been offered promotion. Moreover, the promotion process was disconnected from actual job performance as several interviewees mentioned men they knew who had secured promotions by doing well in formal interviews away from the workplace despite poor performance in their jobs.

In financial services, promotion was more common with most interviewees in mid or late career stages having achieved promotion (nine out of 11) within the organisation hierarchy and those in their early career also anticipated progressing internally. Nevertheless, promotion was discretionary, based on management-determined succession planning and non-transparent criteria, which four interviewees considered involved favouritism towards men, observing how women appeared to take longer to be promoted:

When you were a woman, they wouldn’t promote you until probably after nine or 10 years. Yet men were promoted within five years. (Maria, financial services)

Some interviewees felt overlooked, sharing Takondwa’s sentiments:

I have been in the current position [client services consultant] for eight years . . . There haven’t been any chances for a promotion . . . I was asking my boss this the other day, ‘What do you look at to promote somebody because I think I have overstayed at this position and there is nothing that is coming up?’. (Takondwa, financial services)

While some western women may face similar experiences, these problems were experienced by full-time staff who were fully committed to the organisations. The consequences of these organisational ideal (male) worker norms were exacerbated by the social, family and gender context in which these Malawian women were seeking to maintain their careers. The interviewees faced family pressure both for breadwinning and for care and domestic work. As they explained, breadwinning pressures were extremely high and their income was essential to meet their family’s needs. The case of Susan is particularly illustrative:

My son has brain damage . . . I had used all my leave days. My supervisor asked me to take unpaid leave so I was just down and I thought that I should just quit my job and look after my baby . . . my husband said no arguing that – nowadays it’s not easy for one person to support the family, and the baby that we have needs a lot of money so relying on money from one pocket will not work. (Susan, financial services)

The interviewees not only worked to support their own nuclear family (either with partners or as single parents) but also to meet extended family commitments, particularly supporting children orphaned because of AIDS. Interviewees reported helping parents, supporting siblings with their studies or raising orphaned nieces and nephews.

Norah was one of the interviewees who highlighted this:

[My salary is] . . . very, very important. I had two sisters and I have lost both of them together with their husbands and they left us [with their] seven kids and we only have three but we have [educated] them all. (Norah, teacher)

Even within the immediate nuclear family, the women’s wages were vital for family survival; leaving their jobs was not an option, as Mary recounts:

[. . .] if you took out my salary we would struggle . . . It complements a lot . . . I don’t even think that my husband would start, he knows that’s what puts bread and butter on the table . . .. (Mary, financial services)

The women also had to deal with onerous and extensive domestic work. Where finances did not allow for domestic help the outcome was extreme double shifts:

I wake up at 2:30 a.m. . . . I fetch water, then do some household chores like mopping, sweeping . . . then . . . I prepare my child for school then I get myself prepared for work. (Ndaziona, teacher)

Those in financial services could afford domestic helpers but still had major domestic responsibilities including feeding, preparing and taking children to school:

I normally wake up at 5:00 a.m. and I do my household chores, of course I have a [domestic] worker but some of the things I need to do on my own, I make sure my kids are up at 6:00, I get them ready . . . for school. (Takondwa, financial services)

Some husbands also had expectations, for example, that their wife should be home first and cook the meal, even if these could not always be met. These expectations could be important in shaping women’s careers, as a female manager reported:

It’s quite tough actually, when you are single it’s ok, you have no problems, but when you get married, you end up with a husband and husbands have got their own rules and terms of how their wives should operate . . . that is very, very stressful . . . if you are not careful it’s going to have a very big negative implication on your job . . .. (Nangozo, financial services)

Another manager referred to a woman whose husband would not agree to her attending an evening event to promote the company’s products:

She was willing, she really wanted to come . . . but now the husband is saying, ‘You did not give me notice, you will not go’. (Teleza, financial services)

While women’s decisions are not fully autonomous in western societies, the degree of a husband’s influence described by interviewees was relatively high; those with husbands who allowed them some autonomy described them as ‘very understanding’ and considered themselves as ‘lucky to have married good men’.

Alongside these varying family constraints, women were expected to participate in wider community activities; this went beyond men’s role in attending, for example, funerals and weddings to include the unpaid work in preparing such events. These are regarded as the collective responsibility of women in the community and therefore are difficult even for women in full-time formal employment to avoid.

Managing careers in the Malawian formal sector

These contextual factors feed into our second research question, namely how our interviewees navigated these constraints and what agency they used to shape their career paths. In practice, they were all pursuing organisational full-time careers, the vast majority with one main employer. Of the 55 women interviewed, 37 had over 10 years’ continuous work experience with their current employer, with 19 recording 20 years of service and above. In both sectors the interviewees expected progression up the organisational hierarchy to be their main career path, even if these opportunities were delayed or blocked.

Quitting employment or reducing hours were not options according to our interviewees. These continuous careers were maintained despite the lack of accommodating employer policies; the women displayed no tendency to move out of employment due to childcare or when forced to follow spouses. Only two had interrupted careers, both in financial services: Happiness had accompanied her husband abroad but returned to her job after four years, while Teleza temporarily opted out of employment when unable to stop sexual harassment by an immediate manager but later secured a similar role in a different company. While Teleza could be said to be seeking greater authenticity in line with kaleidoscope career theory, it is a single case with no other interviewees reporting opting out of organisational full-time employment or reconstructing their careers to pursue varying personal values and priorities over the life-course. Nor was there evidence, in contrast to what kaleidoscope theory considers typical, that the women had sought ‘balance’ in mid-career as either the objective or the result of their work–life articulation strategies, despite most (44 out of 55) having children. Likewise, none had adopted or even sought flexible working, whether homeworking or part-time, to address care responsibilities, except as short-term informal arrangements to deal with sickness. Nor did they normally seek to change employers, in part due to expectations of employer loyalty and limited vacancies (and the lack of alternative employers for teaching beyond the state), even when partners were promoted and posted to a new area. Despite high tensions between work and family demands, their focus was on managing these tensions in ways that allowed them to maintain full-time employment that, given the breadwinning pressures, was their key priority.

How then did they manage these tensions and what are the implications for how women’s careers are understood? Although these women’s careers did not present any boundaryless features, there was clear evidence of agentic responses in shaping their careers directed at overcoming organisational barriers rather than initiating new and protean career paths. Despite the challenges of work–life articulation, over half of the sample had progressed in their careers by mid to late stage. In financial services, their strategies included displays of commitment (through very long hours), hard work (to ensure persistent good performance), finding ways to make themselves visible to decision-makers and upgrading qualifications to secure a pay rise or future promotion. Teachers used agency to provide direction to their careers, mainly through upgrading qualifications. Fifteen out of 31 who had started as primary school teachers had upgraded to enable progression to senior school teaching. In some cases, this demonstrated remarkable persistence: for example, Pilarina finally achieved promotion after 21 years, three failed promotion boards, four years spent post qualifying waiting for promotion and a further year before actually being paid as a secondary school teacher.

Despite mainly staying within a single organisation, the women did not follow traditional linear organisational careers but instead had to make compromises and find ways to manage their careers within effectively irreconcilable constraints. The very different but equally difficult demands of careers in teaching and financial services led to divergent overarching strategies for work–family reconciliation. In teaching, despite short classroom hours, women had to undertake preparation and manage the housework and much of the childcare without domestic help. In financial services, women hired domestic help to enable them to work the expected long hours, but this came at the cost of limited time with their children and continued expectations of family duties that they must perform themselves. For both groups of women, reconciling work and family was stressful and involved long total work hours and a high level of organisation. At particular junctures, specific issues arose either within the family or at work that required compromises that impacted on one or both domains. As these accommodations were made within a full-time continuous career, they did not lead to any form of work–life balance. Instead, the compromises resulted often in ‘second-best’ or makeshift solutions for both spheres.

Women’s careers as makeshift careers

The analysis revealed the importance of makeshift and second-best compromises and trade-offs for managing the tensions between work and family pressures, including leaving some family and community expectations unfulfilled. Four main types of compromises emerged in the coding and illustrate these tendencies.

Compromises to maintain full-time employment when children are young

As giving up employment was not an option, women had to find ways to resolve the conflicts and tensions they faced from pregnancy onwards. In financial services, as maternity leave ranged from only 8–12 weeks, interviewees reported strategies to extend it, namely accumulating it with other leave entitlements, even if often to the displeasure of the employers. In teaching, leave was 12 weeks but low incomes meant that in contrast with their counterparts in financial services who used nannies, teachers either relied on family members for childcare support or, if not available, sought ‘cheap’ ways of combining parenthood with work responsibilities. For instance, one teacher left her four-year-old child playing with neighbourhood friends, loosely watched by neighbours, and another took her son to school with her from when he was 5 months old until he was 3 years old and could attend a nursery that she could afford. Employers made no provision for breastfeeding in either sector despite public health policy recognising its importance for babies’ health. In teaching, mothers often used the shorter classroom hours to continue breastfeeding, but in finance many had to shorten breastfeeding.

In financial services, compromises to cope with long hours and travel requirements were common among mothers. Sandra, a manager in a financial services firm, recalled how when her children were young, she had moved to another full-time job with less expectation for travel. This did not involve opting out of employment (protean) or the corporate structure (kaleidoscope), but just changing jobs:

My previous job involved a lot of travelling and was very demanding. Since at that time I had a very young child, I had to change jobs within the organisation to a job that involved less travelling. I had to search and see what I really wanted from my life at that point – and it was the responsibility that I have towards my children that mattered . . .. (Sandra, financial services)

Compromises to fulfil social expectations while working full-time

Another set of compromises had to be made to deal with the social expectations of women’s responsibilities in the home and the community. Interviewees frequently referred to pressures to fulfil the expected duties of a wife. In teaching, Norah reported a complex interweaving of work, childcare and support for her husband throughout the day:

I am one of the busiest women [at this school] because I am married and I don’t have a maid, I do all the work . . . I wake up by 4:30 or 5:00 a.m. I sweep the surroundings of the house, mop, then I let my husband have a bath then . . . I prepare my 11-year-old child for school, then I prepare breakfast and I am the last one to have a bath to come to [work] . . . I am expected to be here by seven o’clock and I spend the whole day here at school. . . . in between, I sneak out, go home and prepare lunch for my dear husband and for myself . . . when I finish work at five I make sure that I have [food] ready . . . if there is ironing to be done [I do it] . . .. (Norah, teacher)

However, in financial services, many women could not meet these expectations as they returned home late, even after their husbands.

Women also faced social expectations to support community-based activities. Those in teaching had to rely on informal permissions to take time off to attend the sick or funerals as annual leave could only be taken in school holidays. In financial services, some women used their annual leave, often without their line managers’ support. Some tried to minimise commitments while not disengaging entirely (e.g. by attending only the night vigils in funerals to avoid taking time off work).

Compromises over the timing and extent of career promotion

In both sectors, promotion for women often required geographical mobility and husbands were generally unwilling to trail spouses (though two female teachers did have trailing spouses). Joyce’s experience illustrates this point:

I had two kids already, so relocating for me was not a possibility . . . self-relocation at this point, no, but if the relocation is to follow my husband, then yes. . . . For me, taking up a job that requires relocating means applying for a job that is in Lilongwe but a fat cheque job. But would I do it today? . . . Today I am still your family woman. (Joyce, financial services)

Both sectors had to service the whole country and the mobility requirement was part of employers’ HR policy. So although in western countries married women are also less likely than men to move for career improvement, promotion is less often tied to relocation. In teaching, there was no internal promotion within the same school or district and as the state is keen to have more female teachers in rural areas, significant relocation was common. Consequently, female teachers were often unable to take up their promotions. Marriam had been promoted in 2013, but in 2016 she was still at her old school. She explained:

I am married. I followed my husband [to this region]. [The Ministry of Education] is expecting me to relocate and work in [a place 163 kilometres away] . . . This means that I would be disrupting the family. (Marriam, teacher)

Compromises were also reported regarding, for example, when or whether to upgrade qualifications needed for promotions. This was more common among teachers due to being less able to afford adequate alternative childcare:

As a mother I felt that in my absence, my kids might not be raised as I would like. That’s why I felt that maybe let me raise them up first before proceeding with my education. (Annabel, teacher)

When my husband died, he left me with four children, the first-born was only 10 years old and the last one was very young. I asked relatives to help with childcare so I could go for upgrading. They refused, arguing they also go to work . . . So, I accepted that I could only rise in the primary school teacher hierarchy, which unfortunately has been slow. (Chipiliro, teacher)

Compromises in women’s career to support a husband’s career and keep the family together

A high share – 45% of the married interviewees – had relocated to follow husbands in their career moves: 11 out of 20 teachers and three of 11 financial services employees. They did so without leaving employment or even their employer. ³ Women were expected to follow while remaining in full-time work and this sometimes came at a high price. For example, Maggie, who was acting up as a secondary school head teacher, was going to follow her husband, a primary school teacher, who was being deployed to another district. Once there, Maggie would revert to being a secondary school teacher, but one reason she gave was:

. . . if you live apart, far away from each other with this deadly disease [AIDS] it can be risky. I know men, sometimes they are not to be trusted. (Maggie, teacher)

Support for internal moves to follow husbands had been stopped in teaching and was also absent in financial services. For instance, Susan reported a range of endeavours to move from northern Malawi to the city where her husband worked, 671.5 kilometres away:

I had to lie for them to move me . . . marriage was not a valid reason for one to move . . . I was lucky to find someone to swap with. (Susan, financial services)

Interviewees thus often had to make compromises and arrangements on their own, using strategies such as swapping jobs or forgoing promotions to keep the family together. Although pressure on women to trail spouses is a global phenomenon, the experiences of trailing wives in developing contexts are more challenging due to the remoteness of many postings and poor transport connections.

In sum, multiple unplanned compromises to maintain continuous full-time working were the defining feature of these Malawian women’s careers. Many had no clear idea how these decisions would affect their careers, as they were often driven by a short-term emerging situation and not following a long-term plan. Their choices did not always result in the optimal outcome for themselves or their families and career progression was sometimes sacrificed for the sake of their non-work obligations.

Discussion: Towards the alternative concept of a makeshift career

The career narratives in this study are characterised by a pattern of compromises and second-best choices that fit neither the traditional organisation-defined paths (Worthington et al., 2005) nor the voluntary self-direction underpinning protean and kaleidoscope models (Cabrera, 2009; Mainiero and Sullivan, 2006). Instead, they suggest the need for a new career concept, that of a ‘makeshift career’ to represent how, throughout their careers, women may have to opt for something ‘temporary and of low quality but used because of a sudden need’. ⁴ The concept of ‘makeshift career’ is closely linked to the idea of compromise in the sense that individuals may need to ‘accept something slightly different from what they really want, because of circumstances or because they are considering the wishes of other people’. ⁵ To develop the case for the makeshift career concept, the discussion first considers how this new concept fits both the context in which women were forging their careers (RQ1) and with evidence of the role played by women’s agency in managing careers amid the tensions of their work–life articulation and their experience of gender discrimination (RQ2). This is followed by a discussion of whether this alternative makeshift career model not only more adequately captures the career paths of women in Malawi and in similar socio-economic contexts than extant models but also could extend understandings of women’s careers in a western context (RQ3).

A first characteristic to emerge from the research material on the Malawian context was the extreme disconnect between employer practices and the needs of the workforce. There is an almost total lack of accommodation to dual earning, with it even becoming more difficult to achieve relocation on family grounds in teaching. There is no sign of the state providing support for domestic burdens in a new ‘reproductive bargain’ as called for by Pearson (2014), yet employers continue to ignore issues of work–life articulation, at best complying reluctantly with limited mandatory maternity leave. While these employer practices may reflect colonial legacies within the public service and western male breadwinner employment models, the key problem may be employers’ monopsonist power over their workforces, enabling them, for example, to insist on difficult relocations as a pre-condition for promotion. With work–life balance already recognised as a utopian imaginary in the West (Lewis et al., 2007), this context provides even less chance of balance. Instead, despite stronger tensions between the two domains (Crompton, 2006), work demands normally prevail due to limited options to adjust employment arrangements to family and care needs. While makeshift compromises only offer limited and unsatisfactory adjustments, they may be the only solution, as women’s earnings are too valued for any departure from dual full-time earning.

This links to the second contextual feature driving the adoption of makeshift arrangements, namely the family and community context. These women faced two types of pressure emanating from the family but pushing in contradictory directions. The first was pressure to be breadwinners – both as dual breadwinners (or as single mothers) and as breadwinning contributors to the extended family. The term breadwinning here reflects the emphasis placed on the importance of women’s earnings in supporting both the immediate and the extended family. A woman’s role as breadwinner, even when her husband is the main breadwinner, can, as Schmidt (2017) argues, change perceptions of the meaning of their work, so that, as Mokomane (2014) suggests, in an African context it becomes part of family care rather than an activity perceived as in conflict with family responsibilities. New career models, alongside debates on work–life articulation, tend to stress pressures on time and on care responsibilities and overlook the material costs of flexible careers. In Malawi, the dominance of the breadwinning imperative shapes the nature of the compromises that women make. These must not jeopardise their employment position and their financial implications must be marginal. These compromises reflect women’s weak position relative to their employers but also the wider insecurity of life in Malawi beyond the shortage of employment. With no social safety net, the risks are higher than in the West of losing a provider partner and also of facing high dependency in the extended family due to health and life events. The limited attention to the breadwinning imperative in western women’s career models indicates a legacy from the historical treatment of women’s employment participation as marginal or contingent. However, even in western countries, how far women see themselves as permanent or contingent labour market participants varies (Lyonette et al., 2011; Sánchez-Mira and O’Reilly, 2019). Furthermore, while joint breadwinning may be facilitated in some contexts – particularly Nordic countries – by social support systems (Schmidt, 2017), in other countries, such as Portugal, the need to boost family income was a major factor in the growth of female breadwinning (Ruivo et al., 1998). Societal context may affect the perceptions and meaning of women’s work and a focus on breadwinning may offer new insights into women’s career decisions and work–life articulation strategies.

The second family pressure on women pushes in the other direction and stems from their domestic and care responsibilities. This differs from a western context not only due to the volume of domestic work but also because formal sector workers are assumed to overcome this conflict by hiring domestic help (Mokomane, 2014), thereby legitimising employers’ disregard of family pressures. Women in financial services did hire domestic help but still had overall responsibility for domestic and care work and for some specific family and community tasks. In teaching, relatively low pay and short classroom hours led women to do most of the domestic work. Thus, the nature of work–life conflicts and the scope for compromises vary across social, economic and cultural contexts. Women are also at the forefront of providing a bridge between cultural traditions and expectations (Lewis et al., 2007), even where employers do not accommodate these traditional roles; for example, at funerals or weddings, or tending the sick.

Our second research question considered the role of women’s agency in shaping careers. The women in this study were found to be agentic but far from the free agents imagined in new career models who self-craft careers or pursue non-material values. Instead, they directed their agency at finding ways to pursue their full-time organisational careers, whether through actions to overcome discriminatory barriers to promotion or by seeking short-term or second-best solutions to help them meet family demands. Most women in this study aspired to advance their careers and took actions to overcome gender beliefs (Ridgeway and Correll, 2004) concerning their competence and performance, while also making trade-offs to accommodate the demands of their complex lives. This complexity included accepting more interference by their husbands in their working lives and decisions than the western norm. Their active engagement and concern to progress their careers stands at odds with assumptions that women would seek balance in their compromises by forgoing jobs that make higher demands (Olsen, 2021). Women’s decisions to delay promotions were mainly linked to problems of family location or to the difficulties of training away from home, thereby preventing them fulfilling their household roles. Most participants were motivated to pursue promotion and indeed some acted up in more responsible roles without a pay rise in the hope of later promotion. Thus, agency was used to further the breadwinning imperative, provided this did not risk long-term family separation.

In relation to our third research question, this study extends conceptual and empirical understandings of women’s careers, first by revealing the limitations of existing career models when applied in a developing country context and, second, by proposing an alternative model that addresses those limitations and may also be applicable to women in developed countries. The ‘makeshift career’ concept characterises career trajectories as the outcome of sequential decisions that are not always made to achieve professional growth and meeting one’s aspirations but instead involve proactive adjustments and compromises to manage the constant tensions between work and family demands and to deal with workplace setbacks. The kaleidoscope theory recognises that women make career choices with reference to the interests of others, particularly in midlife when child rearing (Mainiero and Sullivan, 2006), but it assumes that balance is the main objective at that stage and is achievable, and that in later life stages women pursue an individual search for greater authenticity. Both the kaleidoscope and protean models also over-emphasise the role of free-agency and the voluntaristic nature of women’s career choices. This has obscured the dilemmas and structural constraints that women face due to inequalities in employment and within the home. Those models also pay limited attention to the financial motivations and consequences of these choices. In contrast, the makeshift approach by providing more adequate recognition of the problematic nature of work–life articulation, particularly where breadwinning is part of a woman’s responsibility of caring for their families, also allows for compromises and second-best solutions over women’s whole life-course.

While the qualitative nature and small scale of the research prevents generalisation in a statistical sense, the makeshift career concept is theoretically relevant beyond the scope of the study. The makeshift metaphor fits the Malawian and other developing country contexts characterised by scarcity of formal jobs, strong financial needs, shortage of formal childcare and flexible arrangements, and strong gender norms. This study demonstrates the case for expanding the contextual range of empirical studies to extend perspectives and generate new conceptualisations. The career compromises made by the women in this study were indeed shaped by the Malawian context, but women elsewhere also experience tensions between the family and the work domain, face contextual constraints and barriers at work, and often have to make compromises that result in far-from-ideal outcomes for themselves.

Thus, while further research is needed, the concept should prove useful for examining women’s contemporary careers in western countries. By considering the complex dynamics of how individual decisions interact with organisational factors, societal contexts, family circumstances and financial conditions, this approach highlights the need for a sociological focus on material needs, institutional conditions and collective norms influencing women’s career decisions rather than the new career models’ concerns with individualised values and psychological motivations. Moreover, while women in this study have limited choices other than to pursue full-time continuous careers, even where more options and support are available, women still make constrained choices. Support for dual earning is still often insufficient but cross-national variations in career patterns are also influenced by social norms and institutional legacies from women’s labour market integration process or industrial relations actors’ attitudes to flexible working. Where flexible career options are available, the makeshift career concept could capture the less-than-ideal nature of the solution if flexibility involving interruptions or part-time work limits earnings prospects and advancement. Compared with the over-agentic and over-optimistic stance of new career conceptualisations, the makeshift career metaphor provides a more realistic representation of how women navigate and negotiate their careers, compromising between their family demands and financial constraints within the organisational and societal contexts where careers are forged. The concept of makeshift career recognises the gender inequalities that underpin the constraints and tensions experienced by women everywhere and how these inform their career choices. Although many men also struggle to achieve their full ambitions and have to make do with second best, so long as women bear an unequal share of domestic and care work, it is women’s careers that will be most characterised by compromises and makeshift arrangements to do the best they can to manage their commitments to both spheres.