Gendered Identity Work in Marketing Professions: Performance, Authenticity, and Career Trajectories in the Digital Age

As marketing work in emerging economies becomes digitalized, performance-oriented, and visibility-driven, it is crucial for marketing research to understand how marketers build and perform gendered identities to provide innovative products and services, meet various stakeholders expectations and progress their careers (Alzahrani et al., 2026; Saxena, 2025; Varma et al., 2023). Recent research demonstrates how gender influences marketing decision-making (Varma et al., 2023), professional identity construction (Alzahrani et al., 2026; Saxena, 2025), and career trajectories in organisational contexts. However, the process through which marketers perform, negotiate, and resist gendered expectations remains underexplored. This project seeks to address gaps in our knowledge by integrating ideas from Identity Work Theory (Carr & Kelan, 2025), Performativity Theory (Loarne-Lemaire et al., 2024), and Postfeminist Theory (Zaeemdar, 2025; Chowdhury, 2025) to explore how gender is enacted and negotiated among different groups of marketing professionals. It will examine how they engage in gendered identity work to construct their authentic selves when navigating digitized organizational and industrial contexts. The doctoral researcher will employ a mixed-method design that would combine qualitative and quantitative methods, including ethnographic observation in marketing organisations, interviews with marketing professionals across career stages, analysis of digital identity performances on social media platforms (e.g., LinkedIn, X), and a survey testing relationships between identity work strategies, career outcomes, and organisational contexts using structural equation modelling.

Supervisors

Dr Benjamin Afreh
Dr. Babatunde Musiliu Abina