This research seeks to conceptualize how the communication messages that women received as they entered the workplace during the tumultuous seventies have impacted their own self-images, their perceptions of reality and, by extension, their lives. The aim of this research is not just to provide an overview of the lives of women in male-dominated professions nor to encourage young women to enter non-traditional occupations. Rather, this study seeks to recognize and understand the reasons women felt that it was necessary to sublimate their own personalities in order to enter the corporate environment at that time. In a broader sense, it is hoped that this research may serve to provide a means by which women, often isolated by their career choices, can come to understand that they are not alone, that they can find a different voice, a new place currently unrecognized, from which they can speak about the nature of our lives.

This study has been conducted using the epistemological standards established as the basis for feminist research methodology. I focused on gender and gender identification, make the experiences of the women to whom I spoke a central component of the study, giving visibility and importance to them, and, finally, used their narratives to correct distortions from previous empirical or theoretical assumptions that fail to recognize the centrality of gender to social life.