The emerging identity of women managers in post‐Soviet Belarus

The paper critically reviews women managers' experiences of managing transition in post‐Soviet Belarus. The main aim of the paper is to explore the emerging learning experiences and learning practices of women managers in Belarus who are working in small and medium‐size business enterprises.

The paper commences with an exploration of the country context. It then seeks to draw attention to ongoing economic, political and cultural transformations within Belarus with a view to highlighting ways in which these transformations have impacted on the professional identities of women in Belarus in the post‐Soviet era. Interviews with 16 female managers were constructed to investigate specific issues such as how women managers in Belarus learn to be managers, how they perceive their own positions within organisations, the ways in which women managers use learning strategies as sense‐making mechanisms, and the career‐related obstacles faced by women managers in Belarus.

The findings indicate that women managers have adopted a variety of learning strategies to adjust to the changing nature of Belarusian business culture. These strategies involve drawing on multiple notions of a feminine work identity, which both resists and reaffirms traditional gender roles. The findings highlight women have learn to cope with a fragmented learning organisational context that is devoid of established networking and mentoring systems that are accessible normally to women managers. As such, the interview data indicate that women are developing and adopting individualised learning strategies and mechanisms to enable them to survive and succeed within business organisations.

This research describes experiences of middle‐aged, urban, educated women employed in small and medium business enterprises without taking into account generational, ethnic and other differences.

Although this paper was written from the experiences of women in Belarus, it will be of interest to women experiencing career‐related obstacles.