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Following the renewed interest to harness the full potential of African female employees in the workplace, this paper aims to explore how patriarchal behaviors relate to career adaptability, subjective career success and job satisfaction among women in Nigerian organizations.

A structured questionnaire was used in collecting quantitative data from 508 middle-level managers in Nigerian organizations. The hypotheses were tested with structural equation modeling.

Patriarchal-induced gendered work practices were found to have a significant negative influence on career adaptability among Nigerian career women. Contrary to expectations, patriarchal discrimination was found to have an insignificant negative influence on job satisfaction and subjective career success, suggesting that Nigerian career women still experience significant subjective career success and job satisfaction amid patriarchal practices in the workplace.

For female employees to possess significant career adaptability resources that will enable them to reconstruct their careers to match redesigned job functions in times of innovation in the workplace, organizations should reinvent their human resources (HR) policies that address patriarchal-induced gendered work practices in the workplace.

This current study extends research on how patriarchy affects female employees in African organizations from the traditional research focus of patriarchy and work-life balance relationships to the under-explored area of career experience among women. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first quantitative research that explores how patriarchy influences career adaptability resources, subjective career success and job satisfaction among Nigerian female employees.

The purpose of this research is to investigate how bridging and bonding social capital relate to career success among career women in a patriarchal African society. Further, the intervening role of self-esteem in the association between social capital and career success was examined.

Structured questionnaire was used to collect data from 488 Nigerian career women in management cadres in both private and public sectors. Partial least squares structural equation modeling was applied in testing the proposed hypotheses.

The outcomes show that bridging social capital has a significant positive relationship with subjective and objective career success. Conversely, bonding social capital has no significant positive relationship with subjective and objective career success. Further analyses show that self-esteem only partially mediates the association between bridging social capital and career success while an insignificant intervening effect of self-esteem on the association between bonding social capital and career success was found.

The findings suggest the need for organisations to stimulate a friendly work environment that has a zero-tolerance culture for workplace discrimination against women. This will enable the women to relate with people in the workplace irrespective of gender or cadre to generate more bridging social capital to achieve greater career success.

The study extends social capital and career success research to career women in a patriarchal African context as a response to the call for context-specific career research in non-western countries particularly Africa. Second, the study provides empirical evidence that African career woman with bridging social capital can achieve career success irrespective of their self-esteem level amid patriarchal discrimination.