While individuals often migrate for better career opportunities and growth, migrating to unfamiliar work contexts presents several challenges, including identity shifts, which prompt people to question their self-conception. These identity shifts – and the resulting identity work – may be especially critical for women, who might face unique forms of discrimination, alienation, and aggression in the workplace. Yet, individuals need to have a clear understanding of themselves to function effectively, especially when experiencing changes at work. Understanding how women experience and navigate identity shifts following migration to unfamiliar work contexts is thus critical to fully understanding how individuals construct their identities when undergoing changes at work. Through an inductive, qualitative study of migrant women, we find that our informants experienced what we labeled identity dawns – a growing realization that their identities held different meanings in their unfamiliar work contexts – and illustrate how this realization prompted them to understand their diverse identity-implicating experiences at work. We contribute to the existing management theory on identity following changes at work and migration by revealing and theorizing about a novel, identity-implicating phenomenon women experience when they migrate to unfamiliar work contexts.
