Career Opportunities for Women in Agile Work Environments: An Organizational and Gender-Based Analysis

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6239-705-7_29How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Agile Methods; Women in Tech; Career Advancement; Equality–Equity; Low-Promotable Tasks; Qualitative Content Analysis; Single-Case Study; ICT Sector (Germany)

Abstract

While agile methodologies are often associated with empowerment and self-organization, little is known about their implications for gendered career trajectories. Prior research shows that women in ICT frequently encounter “glass ceiling” effects and perform disproportionate amounts of “invisible work”, This suggests that the intersection of agile work practices with these barriers remains underexplored.

To address this gap, an exploratory single-case study was conducted within a large German IT service provider. Eleven semi-structured expert interviews across diverse agile roles (Product Owner, Scrum Master, Agile Coach, Development, UX, QA) formed the empirical basis. Mayring’s qualitative content analysis was applied to identify mechanisms linking everyday practices to promotion outcomes. Findings indicate that team-level transparency often fails to generate HR-visible signals, resulting in delayed or missed promotions for women. An inductively developed “Three Layers of Barriers” model—structural, process-related, and cultural—explains how agile routines may inadvertently reproduce gendered inequalities in career advancement.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Zoe Tron
AU  - Zeynep Tuncer
AU  - Sabine Moebs
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/06/13
TI  - Career Opportunities for Women in Agile Work Environments: An Organizational and Gender-Based Analysis
BT  - Proceedings of the FIREtalk Conference - Research on FIRE! (research-on-fire 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 407
EP  - 422
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6239-705-7_29
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6239-705-7_29
ID  - Tron2026
ER  -