Encountering sexual and religious abjection: Exploring barriers to career among heterosexual and LGBTQ+ professionals of faith

The empirical aim of this study is to move beyond the intersecting axes of gender and race by exploring experiences of what it is to be a homosexual or heterosexual person of faith and to capture how the interstices of religion and socially constructed notions of 'good motherhood' and 'professionalism' influence these individuals' employment experiences over time. Thus, this proposed study addresses a pressing need for research that is both interdisciplinary and intersectional in its approach. Present management research does not sufficiently recognise the complexities of the relationships among and between difference. An intersectional approach is thus required to better understand the employment experience among workers who embody multiple forms of difference, or what is termed within-group diversity (Özbilgin et al., 2011). Specifically, the research will address calls for more qualitative interdisciplinary research on the experiences of "religious minorities", "non-heterosexual individuals", motherhood and "non-traditional forms of family" (Özbilgin et al., 2011:184).
Existing research on sexuality in organisations usually assumes LGBTQ+ are white (McFadden, 2015). Similarly, scholarship has begun to consider how maternal capacity - women's potential for pregnancy, menstruation and menopause - constrain careers. It is established that women feel pressured to control their 'maternal bodies' to conform to standards of professionalism as a form of internalized obedience (Gatrell, 2019). However, diversity and management literature does not yet offer a cohesive understanding of the link between occupational pressures, sexuality, religion, the maternal role and internalised obedience. The proposed research begins to address these gaps by illuminating the experiences of LGBTQ+ and heterosexual professionals of faith.
Intersectional research designs are recognised as valuable approaches to illuminate how multiple dimensions of diversity interact to produce organisational inequalities for ethnoreligious professionals (Arifeen and Gatrell, 2013). UKRI's 2020 evidence review on Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) research highlights how racial harassment and LGBTQ+ discrimination persists, while the influence of religion has received limited attention in organisational research. This echoes scholarly calls (ibid.) to move beyond the intersecting axes of gender and race.
An innovative multi-method qualitative approach will be adopted using digital diaries and semi-structured interviews (Radcliffe, 2013). Qualitative digital diaries will contribute new insights to existing management literature on work, identity, and family by providing rich episodic data that dynamically captures the relationship between work demands, personal and family responsibilities in a way that traditional approaches cannot. Offering the advantage of immediacy, qualitative diaries facilitate participants' reflexivity - meaning the ability to gain a deeper understanding of the holistic nature of their work-life dynamics, offsetting the problems of retrospective accounts and enabling recent events or daily practices of work-life negotiation to be recalled in detail (ibid.).
Extending intersectionality theory by explaining the complex intersection of the maternal role, religion, sexuality and gendered organisational structures will offer diversity and management research new theoretical perspectives. My research will also offer a strategic foundation, enabling policymakers, businesses and external stakeholders to better understand, measure and facilitate sustainable EDI government policies that help improve UK productivity and worker well-being.