Disrupted selves in transition: How women navigate fertility treatments in the context of work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The challenges of managing the transition to motherhood for working women have been well documented. However, less is known about women whose transition to motherhood is disrupted, stalled, or never realized through complex fertility journeys. This qualitative study explores how 41 working women undergoing fertility treatments experience cross-domain identity challenges that threaten both their desired maternal and professional identities. Through disruptions to initiated identity transitions, participants face three types of cross-domain interferences-embodied, emotional, and cognitive-that create ongoing threats to their desired selves. Unlike typical liminal periods that facilitate identity exploration, we find that repeated fertility treatment disruptions actually erode women's ability to engage in identity play and envision possible selves. This leads to perpetual liminality, where women must make identity trade-offs as their maternal aspirations become increasingly difficult to achieve. Whether fertility treatments succeed or fail, the experience creates a "lingering self" that permanently shapes both personal and professional identities. Our findings extend research on liminality by revealing how extended liminal states can constrain rather than enhance identity exploration, challenging assumptions about the exploratory potential of transitional periods. We also contribute to work-life literature by illuminating how stalled personal identity transitions create unique cross-domain interferences distinct from traditional work-family conflict. These insights suggest organizations need more comprehensive support systems that address the complex, extended nature of fertility journeys while recognizing their lasting impact on employees' sense of self. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".