Patrizia Kokot-Blamey | 40 Outstanding Global Women 2025

Navigating women’s career’s Patrizia’s Kokot-Blamey on mobility, opportunity and international experience

Dr Patrizia Kokot-Blamey is a Senior Lecturer in Organisation Studies at Queen Mary, University of London, and her research interests are in gender at work. In her current research, she seeks to better understand the experiences of women undergoing IVF while working. Her broader research interests focus on motherhood, breastfeeding and women’s bodies at work.

Patrizia’s upbringing in Germany was shaped by her young and energetic parents, who instilled in her a curiosity for the world beyond national borders. Encouraged to learn multiple languages, she studied in the Netherlands and the UK before working across Germany, Belgium, and Spain in her twenties, eventually settling in the UK. Reflecting on this international experience, she acknowledges that there are great benefits to being multilingual and having experience of working internationally.

“I have very young parents,” she says. “They were full of energy during my childhood, and I was always encouraged to look across borders, learn languages, and keep an eye out for opportunities to work abroad.

“I grew up in Germany and was able to take French, Spanish, English, and Dutch lessons as part of our secondary curriculum, which was very lucky. With hindsight, I think that there are costs and opportunities to moving around as well as to staying put, and I appreciate that a bit more now.”

“My parents really believed that you could do something if you persevered. They always encouraged me to explore my options and to travel. So I had a rule until I was in my mid- twenties that if it didn’t fit in my car, it wasn’t coming.

Patrizia’s research on the accounting profession underscores its significant role in shaping the modern world. She credits her time in Glasgow as pivotal in her understanding of the broader societal impact of accounting.

“Accountancy is really underappreciated in the role it plays in actively shaping the modern world,” she says. “I studied in Glasgow during a year abroad in university, and there are some wonderful critical accounting scholars and accounting historians working there. We need accountants to help us see the bigger picture and to trust one another in public life.”

Women and ambition: how the personal and the professional intersect

Patrizia holds a PhD in Gender Studies from the London School of Economics and Political Science and completed a Master’s degree as well as her undergraduate studies in Economics at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. Before pursuing an academic career, she worked as a financial journalist reporting on European equities and economics.

She believes that although young women today are encouraged to be ambitious in their education and careers, society fails to prepare them for independence across all aspects of life, particularly in their personal choices.

“What strikes me at the moment is that we are not adequately preparing young women to be independent across domains,” she explains. “We take our private lives for granted and assume that the pieces will come together over time, but we need to encourage women to actively plan all aspects of their lives.

“My research is focusing more on the challenges that women encounter, because at the moment we don’t always talk about the different aspects of a woman’s life and how the personal and the professional intersect,” she says. “We encourage young people to focus on their careers, we also could show them that, it really helps to have a supportive partner by your side.

“Building your career and deciding when to start a family are things that don’t fall into place necessarily on their own. You need time to find a partner to share your life with. It is a gendered discussion. Historically, we focussed too much on the idea that women should drop out of work to focus motherhood following marriage, but now we are doing it very much the other way around, and that can mean women are short-changed and end up starting a family much later than they might have hoped.”

Patrizia has a particular interest in the accounting profession, comparatively and historically, and women’s careers in Professional Service Firms (PSFs). Her past research focused on the careers of women who made partnership in PSFs in Germany and the United Kingdom and to examine the challenges women experiences on the way to partnership from a feminist perspective.

“In Germany, mothers are pushed to stay at home. In the UK mothers are pushed to focus on work in the way that fathers traditionally have done. In both countries, children’s needs are invisible,” she says. Her book, Gendered Hierarchies of Dependency, examines women’s paths to become partners in accounting firms in the two countries, and finds there are different, but significant barriers to women’s progress in both countries. She is currently editing a new book on gender norms and families with researchers from York and Lincoln which will be published next year.

From financial journalism to academia: shaping public discourse on gender

Patrizia’s early work in financial journalism provided her with valuable insights into how industries operate. She draws parallels between the financial crisis and the challenges currently facing higher education, predicting gendered consequences.

“I enjoyed financial journalism as a young woman. People are incredibly competent and committed. It was such fun, and I learned so much. But it was also my first lesson that things are not always what they seem. The Lehman Brothers collapse was a huge learning curve for me. The financial industry changed irrevocably. We are looking at a similar seismic shift in higher education at the moment, I think, and it will have gendered effects as all crises do. I am interested in focusing on ordinary life and the challenges ordinary families face.”

The evolution of dual-career mobility

Over the past two decades, global corporations and policymakers have become increasingly aware of the complexities surrounding dual-career mobility. Patrizia notes that despite the growth of an internationally mobile workforce, significant challenges remain, particularly regarding visa restrictions that disadvantage accompanying spouses. She is aware of the costs of moving and how it might affect other members of the family.

“With highly skilled migrants, a key issue remains that visa restrictions often means that the spouse or partner who accompanies the assignee ends up becoming de-skilled in the new country,” she says. That is because it places them in a position of dependency vis-à-vis their partner, which can affect dynamics in the household. It limits women’s opportunities because they are less likely than men to accept a position that negatively impacts their partner’s career and their family. Policymakers are missing opportunities here as well to fully integrate dual-career couples.”

Making international experience equitable for women

International career opportunities remain a challenge for women, largely due to the realities of dual-career households. Patrizia emphasizes that organisations must ensure that international assignments benefit not just the primary employee but also their family.

“Women are more likely than men to be in dual-career couples, and they are more likely to forgo opportunities if they do not believe them to be such for all members of their household,” she says. “If employers want to encourage more women to take international opportunities, employers need to make a move abroad equally beneficial for children and spouses. My tips for young women are: apply for everything, have a go, but also commit time to building a private life and recognise that there are opportunity costs to whatever you do.”

Fertility and the female career

As part of her research, Patrizia has explored the intersection of fertility and employment. She remains sceptical about fertility treatments such as IVF and egg freezing, arguing that they create a false sense for women that fertility can be planned in this manner.

“IVF and egg freezing don’t work very well—only one in four IVF treatment cycles is successful, and that chance decreases rapidly as women age. When one’s eggs are gone, they are gone. There are also additional risks to mother and infant. I don’t think we talk about it enough. We are encouraging young women to delay childbearing, but the later you leave it, the more likely you will find yourself trapped in cycles of fertility treatment, which takes a huge toll on women’s careers. Employers need to support families and support men and women to look after their families with time as well as financial resources. Starting a family should not be seen as a substantive risk to one’s career for either sex.”

The challenge of achieving partnership in professional services

Patrizia’s research into professional service firms (PSFs) highlights the persistent structural barriers that women face when striving for partnership. She notes that these challenges vary across different economic systems, with some offering more transparent career progression at the expense of job security.

“There are international differences in how careers and hierarchies are organised,” she says. “Women do well in liberal market economies such as the UK, where structures are more transparent. There is a cost to this, which is a relative lack of job security. In terms of financial roles, I would encourage young women to seek out employment in large Big Four firms. While the hours might be long, but there are structures in place that can be leveraged when you feel you need additional leave, need to work part-time for a while, and these organisations generally offer generous extended maternity leave.”

Her research has found that women have more choice in larger firms in the UK, and that in Germany, relationships are still comparatively more important.

“In liberal economies like the UK, I found that women can achieve very well as long as they manage to work in the same way that men might. Large employers in the UK have more processes in place that can be leveraged to accommodate different stages in a woman’s life. For example, there will be a process in place to apply for part time work. You might not always get it, but there will be a process that is comparatively more organised and structured. Often women choose to work in smaller organisations, thinking that the work practices there will be more flexible, but that is not always the case. While the working hours might be shorter in the early years, the processes in place in large organisations can benefit women and their careers.”

Her research uncovered a more structured and proceduralised approach to careers and hierarchies in the UK, and the women she interviewed described the importance of understanding the performance management system in place and accurately signalling their expectations and market value throughout the appraisal and promotions process. 

Motherhood and misconceptions about professional ambition

Motherhood continues to intersect with career progression in complex ways, and Patrizia believes that many employers and colleagues hold outdated assumptions.

“We often talk about motherhood as if it was very much a thing in decline. Yes, the fertility rate has declined, but four in five of us still have children in our lifetime. In fact, only 16% of women born in 1977 did not proceed to have children by the time they were 46. Pregnancy and maternity are big transitions in a woman’s life.

“Most of us will be working a good forty years now, but too many employers turn pregnancy and maternity into an anxiety-riddled time for women. Ambition across one’s life cycle goes up and down. There is nothing wrong with that. It really frustrates me hearing colleagues who should know better say that someone isn’t as committed because they aren’t currently working full-time when they realistically have another 25 years of work ahead of them. I do think that men who take a step back to be active parents—either during shared parental leave or the early years—face very similar costs. Employers need to offer workers a way back in.”

She says that greater flexibility in careers and working practices would  help men and women, and that men’s careers are often less linear and structured than they might first appear. Burnout, stress and a need for new challenges are potential factors in everyone’s working life.

Leadership and the balance between work and community

Patrizia approaches leadership with a strong sense of organisation and a passion for creativity.

“I really enjoy the creative aspects of my job, and I am very organized,” she says. “Academia, especially in the social sciences, is a bit different from other types of organisations, and line management can come at significant detriment to one’s research. I look out for leadership opportunities that I think I can contribute well in. I really enjoyed being a research centre co-director a couple of years ago, and I am looking out for similar opportunities at the moment. I have also taken on leadership roles in our local community—that is really important to my husband and me—to show our children that we are not an island but that we actively contribute to the community we live in.”

“I think we need to arm young people with the knowledge and skills to create their own plan, think clearly about their career path and build their own support system. You will not necessarily find your most effective support system at work – it is more likely to be your family and friends. You can have friends at work that you will be able to connect with over the years, and I think that’s particularly important in the early years of your career. But it will be your family, a spouse, your parents, and your children who will celebrate you when you are doing really well.”