Unmothered at Work: Organizational Silence Around Reproductive Loss

Abstract

An identity transition refers to changes in self-concept that can result from professional or personal shifts. Although organizations increasingly support institutionally legible and culturally normative nonwork transitions, others remain professionally stigmatized or culturally unspeakable. This raises important questions about how employees navigate institutionally unrecognized nonwork transitions—such as reproductive loss—amid organizational silence. To investigate this question, I draw on 3 years of autoethnographic data spanning multiple losses and organizations. I find that organizational silence not only produces cross-domain identity dissonance—a type of identity strain that arises when continuity is required in one domain despite profound disruption in another—but also creates conditions for agency to emerge. Embodied experience provides a channel for this identity work by drawing an anticipated self into the present and making the end of an anticipated transition difficult to contain across domains. This study advances identity transition research by offering new insights into how employees manage profound personal disruption in the workplace.