The Postsocialist Superwoman: Rethinking women's careers in Hungary and Poland

This summer, our research on women managers in Hungary and Poland caught the attention of the Polish business press. The idea that seemed to resonate most was one we call the ‘postsocialist superwoman’ – our shorthand for a pattern we found again and again in the career stories we collected.

The project behind it – ‘Post-pandemic experiences of women's careers in post-socialist illiberal contexts’ – ran for two years and brought together Irina Cheresheva (British University Vietnam), Anna Górska (Kozminski University, Poland), Anna Hidegh (Corvinus University of Budapest, Hungary), Henriett Primecz (Johannes Kepler University, Austria), Marton Racz (British University Vietnam), Martyna Śliwa (University of Bath), and me as the PI. Funded by the Wellcome Trust through the British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grants Scheme (SRG2324\241754), we set out to ask an under-researched question: what happens to women's careers when a country's illiberal politics actively works against gender equality?

Hungary and Poland are a striking place to address this question. More women work full-time in both countries than almost anywhere else in Europe, yet over the last decade, both governments have pursued explicitly pro-traditional-family, anti-gender-equality policies. Add the complex history of socialism, the regime change to market capitalism, EU accession, the financial crisis of 2008, the illiberal turn, and the COVID-19 pandemic on top, and the two countries offer a particularly rich vantage point.

We interviewed 60 women managers (30 in Hungary and 30 in Poland) from first-line supervisors to chief executives, in both multinational and local companies. Using a microhistorical approach, we asked women to tell us the story of their careers, often prompted by career timelines they created, linking their own milestones to the historical events that shaped them. This enabled us to see something that's otherwise easy to miss, namely how conflicting career expectations built up in layers, deeply imbedding inequalities.

‘Layered legacies’ and the ‘postsocialist superwoman’

We found that each of six political and economic eras left its own mark on what was expected of women at work, and, crucially, that these expectations didn't get replaced as history moved on. Instead, they piled up. We call this ‘layered legacies’: the socialist-era assumption that women must work yet that mothers, not fathers, are the default carers still sitting right alongside newer pressures around global career mobility, always-on availability and hybrid work.

It's this layering that produces what we've termed the ‘postsocialist superwoman’ – a woman expected to meet competitive, international career standards while also being the ever-available wife, mother and household manager that older, and newer, political narratives both still expect. As we told one Polish business magazine, ‘superwoman’ in this context is not a compliment to individual resilience, perseverance and courage (although our research participants indeed embodied these qualities) but a warning of layered burdens that have shifted the costs of inequality onto individuals.

That reframing matters practically, too. Many of the women we spoke to have shifted their own thinking from believing individual effort and resilience were the answer, to actively backing structural fixes like quotas and enforceable targets. Careers, our findings suggest, are collective, historical and political achievements rather than just individual accomplishments, which has implications for how we theorise careers and how employers think about addressing gender inequality.

Working across three languages

One methodological choice worth highlighting is what we call ‘translanguaging’: rather than translating every interview into English before analysing it, we collected and analysed the Polish, Hungarian and English material side by side, in the language it was spoken in. This was more work but surfaced findings – for example, about how differently ‘career’ and ‘success’ are understood in each language, and how fluency in English functions as an unofficial marker of workplace status – that a straight translation could have left under the radar.

Sharing the findings

Data collection and analysis are now complete, and we've been sharing the findings at international conferences, including the British Academy of Management, the European Group for Organization Studies, the European Academy of Management, International Critical Management Studies, and the Standing Conference on Organizational Symbolism. Academic publications are in the pipeline, and anyone who'd like to hear more directly is welcome at our free public event with CMS InTouch.

Beyond academia

This project has also mattered to us as one that reaches people outside academia. In addition to the coverage in the Polish business press (Businesswoman & Life and Forbes Women), we have a blog post in the pipeline with the British Academy of Management's Business Research Unpacked, and in May presented directly to Egyenlítő Alapítvány (Equalizer Foundation), a Hungarian gender-equality NGO, in a talk that's still available to watch online. We've also written a practitioner-facing report for HR and D&I leads, professional associations and NGOs supporting women's careers – currently held back until our academic papers clear peer review, but coming soon.

For now, though, the key message from our project is this: when we talk about enabling women’s careers, we need to look beyond today's org chart to the political history stacked up underneath it.

Alexandra Bristow 

Alexandra Bristow is the Director of Research Degrees for the Faculty of Business and Law, and the Principal Investigator on “Post-pandemic experiences of women's careers in post-socialist illiberal contexts”, funded by the Wellcome Trust through the British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grants Scheme SRG2324\241754.