Research Paper
Article citation: Gupta, R., Sharma, T., & Bisht, N. S. (2025). Making better career decisions: From challenges to opportunities. Journal of Vocational Behavior.
Abstract
The return to work after maternity leave is a critical yet underexplored career transition. Existing scholarship largely emphasizes individual adaptation and identity reconstruction, while overlooking how social, relational, and institutional forces intersect to shape mothers' experiences and decisions during the return to work. Understanding this gap is vital, as the post-maternity return often determines women's career continuity and reveals how subtle relational forces sustain gendered inequalities. We draw on the concept of felt accountability, an internalized sense of being answerable to salient audiences, to examine how returning mothers make sense of and navigate competing demands. Using qualitative data from highly skilled women in India's information technology (IT) sector and a hermeneutic phenomenological approach, we explore how they manage conflicting accountabilities amid high professional expectations, rapid skill obsolescence, and cultural norms positioning mothers as primary caregivers. By foregrounding felt accountability we offer a socially embedded and relational perspective on post-maternity transitions, showing how mothers negotiate tensions between caregiving and career in ways that are emotionally charged, context-sensitive, and continually evolving. Our findings reveal how temporal construals shape felt accountability, as mothers shift between high-level (future-focused, value-driven) and low-level (immediate, feasibility-driven) interpretations in response to competing pressures, that, in turn, influence decisions about work and caregiving. We position accountability to the self as a vital yet overlooked facet of felt accountability, showing how internal values render the self a salient audience alongside external one. Finally, we advance career transition scholarship by redirecting attention from inward-looking identity reconstruction to accountability-driven, socially embedded processes.