On the dynamics of intersectional (in)visibility: Women early career researchers negotiating authenticity at work
研究女性早期职业研究人员如何在工作中应对可见、不可见和过度可见的条件，协商并表达真实的自我，揭示了真实性是一个持续的认同建构过程。
How do women negotiate and express authenticity in professional contexts where their presence and identities are largely rendered (in)visible? We draw on intersectional invisibility as our conceptual lens to explore how women early career researchers subjectively negotiate authenticity given prevailing conditions of visibility, invisibility and hypervisibility at work. Based on semi-structured interviews with recipients of the Organisation for Women in Science from Developing Countries (OWSD)-Elsevier award, we illuminate how (in)visible conditions shape the subjective negotiation of authenticity, informing the agentic capacity of women researchers to express themselves authentically in professional settings. Our findings reveal the negotiation of authenticity is closely tied to gender performance in a manner that aligns with perceived professionalism. This entails compartmentalising personal values when feeling invisible, experiencing a heightened awareness of context-specific boundaries when visibility increases and enacting adaptive agency when hypervisible. We thus posit authenticity as a continuous process of ongoing identity construction and negotiation rather than a static ideal.