Home / Lectures / Allison Gabriel, Purdue University
Understanding Working Women’s Lives: An Exploration of Postpartum Allyship in Organizations

Allison Gabriel, Purdue University
Description
Semester:
- Winter 2024
Speakers:
Lecture Time:
Fri, March 22, 2024 @ 1:30 pm to 3:00 pm
Lecture Location:
R0220, Ross building
Speaker Webpage(s):
https://business.purdue.edu/directory/bio.php?username=asrosset
Introduced By:
No introduction available.
Abstract
Many women experience psychological and emotional challenges during their
transition to becoming a working mother, making the reentry process after parental leave crucial
for helping women thrive at work and at home. Within this talk, I will provide an overview of
past scholarship I have conducted in this area on breastfeeding in the workplace and postpartum
depression. Then, I will discuss our research on postpartum allyship—specific behaviors that
coworkers and managers can enact to support and advocate for working mothers during their
reentry process postpartum. To do so, I will highlight findings from three complementary
studies. In Study 1, we adopted a qualitative approach to gain insight into the forms of allyship
working mothers found valuable. We then build upon these findings in Study 2 by developing
and validating a scale of postpartum allyship. Finally, in Study 3, integrating emergent themes
from our qualitative data with tenets of the social cognitive model of career self-management
(Lent & Brown, 2013, 2019), we use our newly-developed measure in a time-lagged study
focused on the cognitive, affective, and behavioral impact of postpartum mothers’ experiences of
allyship. Results indicated that postpartum allyship experiences bolster work-motherhood self-
efficacy and reduce guilt which, in turn, yield important implications for working mothers’
turnover intentions, work-family capital, and postpartum depressive symptoms. Across these
papers, I aim to bring theoretical and practical attention to how to best support working mothers.
Recording & Additional Notes
No additional notes available.