Having it All? A Phenomenological Exploration of Women's Sense of Fulfilment
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Using reflective lifeworld research (Dahlberg et al., 2001), a qualitative, phenomenological method, this study explored the phenomenon of having it all yet not feeling fulfilled. The experience of successful women feeling unfulfilled at midlife is pervasive while at the same time there is a general lack of research. The purpose of the study was to gain a better understanding of the phenomenon through an in-depth exploration of women’s experiences. Open-ended semi structured interviews were completed with seven women in their forties who lived in Ontario. Study participants self-identified as successful yet experiencing a sense of feeling unfulfilled. The broader essence identified by participants was a feeling of dissonance between how they feel and what they have achieved. This manifested in eight themes: a sense of ennui (feeling = bored), experiencing incongruence (feeling = internal tension/anxiety), the weight of expectations (feeling = pain), a lack of direction (feeling = lost), making compromises (feeling = frustration), a sense of disillusionment with world (making a difference) (feeling = disheartened), experiencing fatigue (feeling = spent), and the perception of being undervalued (feeling = sad). Integrated findings included the identification of the phenomenon as a marker or motivator for change, the shifting perspective of career success from objective to subjective, the intersection between mid-life and self-identity and the importance of values awareness and alignment. These findings help to bring awareness to this phenomenon as it relates to well-being and career development theory, policy and practice. From a policy perspective the nuanced understanding of career constructs, including career, purpose, work-life balance and the relationship between success and fulfilment were discussed. The importance of considering this phenomenon in practice was considered both from the perspective of the individual and in a therapeutic setting.
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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) | 0.001 | 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) | 0.002 | 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".