# I Can('t) Talk About It At Work: Stigma Entanglement and the Epistemic Vulnerability Paradox

Heidi Reed

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## To cite this version:

Heidi Reed. I Can('t) Talk About It At Work: Stigma Entanglement and the Epistemic Vulnerability Paradox. Gender, Work and Organization, 2025, 10.1111/gwao.70044. hal-05353513

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ORIGINAL ARTICLE

OPEN ACCESS

An Exploration of Being Childfree at Work: Challenges and Opportunities

# I Can('t) Talk About It At Work: Stigma Entanglement and the Epistemic Vulnerability Paradox

Heidi Reed

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Audencia Business School, Nantes, France

**Correspondence:** Heidi Reed (heidi.reed@audencia.com)

**Received:** 17 January 2025 | **Revised:** 4 July 2025 | **Accepted:** 18 September 2025

**Keywords:** epistemic care work | ethics of sensitive research | personally relevant research | pregnancy loss in the workplace | social construction of not-knowledge

## ABSTRACT

Pregnancy loss in the workplace is a common yet hidden experience. Why? In this conceptual essay, I use my embodied experiences of miscarrying at work and my reluctance to research this phenomenon to develop the concept of an epistemic vulnerability paradox. I contribute to the pregnancy loss in the workplace, social construction of knowledge, and personally relevant research literatures by demonstrating how the confrontation to an entanglement of stigmas involving multiple identities, including that of ideal researcher, leads to a cycle of epistemic silencing. This silencing may be more pronounced in fields like business-academia in which there are not only very gendered ideal worker norms but also strong taboos around “appropriate” methodologies. Drawing on ethics of care as a theory and practice, researchers have a moral obligation to address epistemic needs created by such silences. Engaging in epistemic care work, however, leaves researchers vulnerable to the very stigma that they explore, especially when the research is personally relevant. Working through this paradox, I argue, involves accepting vulnerability not only as an openness to helping and being helped but also to harm and being harmed; a premise that has implications for research ethics.

## 1 | Introduction

I am particularly distressed when references to miscarriage are missing from appropriate literature. It is painful to find that miscarriage has been overlooked in writing about women's health or pregnancy. The silence feels like still more discounting of my experience, another insult to my unborn child.

(Reinharz 1988, 100)

The way Reinharz describes her 1973 pregnancy loss feels frustratingly familiar. Three decades after her cry for more research on this topic, the medical field is still characterized as “silent” with few guidelines for healthcare staff on caring for pregnancy loss patients (Keep 2021; Plagg et al. 2024), including

both mothers and fathers (Martins et al. 2023). If the medical literature treats this as a taboo topic, it is perhaps not surprising that the workplace literature is correspondingly absent (Donaghy et al. 2024; Meunier et al. 2021) and undertheorized (Gilbert et al. 2023; Reiheld 2015). The pregnancy at work literature mostly ignores miscarriage and assumes there will be a live birth at the end (Porschitz and Siler 2017) while the bereavement in the workplace literature fails to capture pregnancy loss as a distinct form of grief (Brier 2008; Frost et al. 2007) that is often unacknowledged by coworkers and organizations (Donaghy et al. 2024; Hazen 2003). I want to note that not everyone characterizes this experience as a loss or grief, and I acknowledge this terminology as problematic in that it suggests how someone should feel which is not what I want. It is a term that reflects my experience but is not meant to represent the experience of everyone. As someone who miscarried while working,

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

© 2025 The Author(s). Gender, Work & Organization published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
I can personally attest that the workplace is indeed an appro-
priate literature to explore this phenomenon.

In her auto-ethnography on infertility, Griffiths (2021) notes that “we are getting better at talking about pregnancy, maternity, and returning to work after having children (although there are substantial improvements still to be made) but what comes before this is rarely acknowledged” (403). Appealing to our sense of responsibility, and only after making the way a little easier for the next ones, she calls on us “to start sharing our stories and exposing our vulnerabilities to help others” (403). In her call is an echo from Reinharz (1988), cited at the start of this essay:

In order for there to be a major change in the way pregnancy is experienced and miscarriage is prepared for and coped with, women and women's advocates will have to take a large share of the responsibility for creating new structures through which they can define and redefine their experiences.

(p. 100)

By using personal narrative as an illustrative case, this con-
ceptual essay explores how not-knowledge in the workplace is
socially constructed and contributes to the literature on preg-
nancy loss in the workplace, personally relevant research, and
the social construction of knowledge. The essay proceeds in
three parts: First, I review the literature on knowledge taboos
and stigma. Second, I use personal narrative to illustrate how
the intersection of ideal parent, worker, and researcher norms
leads to an entanglement of stigmas, creating a silencing barrier.
Third, drawing on ethics of care, I develop the concept of the
epistemic vulnerability paradox, highlighting how openness to
vulnerability can be a relational approach to cope with this
paradox.

2 | Pregnancy Loss in the Workplace as a Knowledge Taboo

One in four pregnancies will end in miscarriage, usually before
28 weeks, and roughly 2.6 million babies are stillborn each year
(Simelela 2024), yet pregnancy loss is publicly perceived as a
"rare" complication (Bardos et al. 2015). The experience of
pregnancy loss is common yet somehow unknown. For
Tuana (2006), "ignorance in the fields of knowledge production
is far more complex an issue than something we simply do not
yet know" (3). To this end, Hudson and Okhuysen (2014) use
the term knowledge taboos to describe "knowledge that we are
forbidden to know or we do not want to know" (251). They
argue that although we have made progress understanding the
social processes of knowledge construction, "we perhaps do not
fully understand how 'not-knowledge' is constructed socially"
(251), though they propose stigma as an important theoretical
lens to explain the silence around certain topics.

Stigma is a relational-based “attribute, behavior, or reputation which is socially discrediting in a particular way” (Goffman 1963, 3). Pollock et al.’s (2020) scoping review identifies

two types of stigma particularly relevant for pregnancy loss,
public stigma and self-stigma, and emphasizes how silencing
becomes a social management tool that reinforces these stigmas.
Public stigma relates to the external stigmatizing experiences of
the bereaved parent and their community, whereas self-stigma
is associated with the fear of experiencing public stigma and
involves internalizing stereotypes associated with pregnancy
loss. Stigma, however, is not confined to those who possess
certain attributes or experiences. Stigma transfer occurs when
those who interact with the stigmatized become stigmatized
themselves through association (Aranda et al. 2023). Hudson
and Okhuysen (2014) propose then that organizationally taboo
topics are under researched because of fear around stigma
transfer, or in other words, the risk that the researcher or
research institution may become “contaminated.”

In denouncing the silence in management research around “the many complexities of reproduction and mothering: pregnancy, fertility and infertility, miscarriage, abortion, birth, breastfeeding and so on” Gatenby and Humphries (1999) argue that it is the “physicality, the sexuality, and the emotionality of these topics which is taboo… The emotional and physical aspects of childbearing and grief remain invisible and silent. There continues to be no room for ‘hysteria’ in organizations or careers” (290). For Gilson (2011), we avoid our own vulnerability, “the potential susceptibility of one’s body to pain, to less than ‘ideal’ functioning” (322), and deny our relationality by dissociating from others who remind us of our vulnerability (Gilson 2011). In this way, “ignorance is established not by refraining from investigating certain questions or by directly withholding knowledge from certain groups of people, but through social practices and habits” (Gilson 2011, 315). Invulnerability is the ultimate norm, “a stance that enables us to ignore those aspects of existence that are inconvenient, disadvantageous, or uncomfortable for us, such as vulnerability’s persistence. As invulnerable, we cannot be affected by what might unsettle us” (Gilson 2011, 313). Invulnerability then is an ethical and epistemological closure that prevents knowledge (Gilson 2011).

Building on the courage of the pregnancy loss in the work-
place storytellers before me (Allen and Craven 2020; Boncori
and Smith 2019; Forhan 2010; Okamoto 2023; Porschitz and
Siler 2017; Reinharz 1988; Weaver-Hightower 2012; Lah-
man 2009; Pérezts 2022), in the next sections, I examine my
own confrontation to stigma and my reluctance to write this
essay in the hope that doing so may help uncover why there is
still so little research on pregnancy loss in the workplace. By
using my personal experience, I hope to “provide emotional
flesh to a claim and stimulus for [] calls to action” (Roulet
et al. 2025, 520) with the view that writing is a “mechanism to
unravel the structured systems of oppression” (Prasad 2016,
439). Such embodied writing is “scary… the baring of emotions
and fragility” (Boncori and Smith 2019) is not something I
started out wanting to do. In embracing my vulnerability, I
hope to integrate pregnancy loss into a wider discourse not
only to destigmatize it but to reach others for whom this has
not yet happened. It is my care-full attempt to socially
deconstruct not-knowledge.
# 3 | Pregnancy Loss in the Workplace as an Illustrative Case of Not-Knowledge Construction

## 3.1 | Violating Ideal Mother-to-Be Norms

I started spotting for the third time at work. I did not dare mention it to my colleagues. I had worked for 2 years as an adjunct faculty and had finally been hired as a permanent professor. I was still on a 3-month probationary contract. I did not want anyone to know I was pregnant let alone that I might be becoming unpregnant. I again called the maternity clinic to again be asked the same question, “Is this your first pregnancy?” followed by another dismissal that a little bleeding is “nothing to worry about.” The message was clear. As a woman who had never given birth, I was incapable of knowing if something was wrong with me and my baby. I spent the rest of the workday secretly googling “signs of miscarriage,” hiding my screen as others walked into the shared office. I waited until work was over to go with my husband to the clinic thinking that if I was physically there, it would be harder for them to turn me away. I was right. An unnamed man, he had no name badge, nor did he introduce himself or explain who he was (nurse, doctor, technician), turned on the ultrasound machine as my husband held my hand. After several minutes of pressing my stomach and then my cervix with some cold tool, he looked at the screen instead of us to say “there is nothing.” He mentioned something about a blighted ovum, a term I would later have to google, before rushing to leave the room. As a foreigner, all of this was happening in a language that is not my own yet even if it had been, I still would not have understood these terms which were not explained.

I thought my bleeding was my first period after a missed miscarriage. I had heard of those. Usually, they happen even before you know you are pregnant! It was not until I woke up the next morning in excruciating pain that I knew it was not that. Thank god I was supposed to work from home that day. I again went to google. All the medical websites described miscarriage pain as similar to having strong menstrual cramps. No, not for me. I finally searched the mom's to be message boards which I had previously shunned during my pregnancy in place of real, scientific, information from real medical websites. These women used words that resonated and prepared me for what was going to happen next. I was having labor contractions, not menstrual cramps, which would build and build. Even if my child had never developed beyond the legal definition of life, I was going to deliver a placenta that had continued to grow for almost 3 months. My cervix needed to dilate to expel it. The women on these boards reassured anyone who would tumble upon their messages that whatever you want to do with whatever comes out is ok, no judgment. It would be ok to put it in a shoebox and bury it in the yard as some had or instead to flush it quickly down the toilet as had others. Medical websites do not give advice on such things.

How could that man have looked at that screen and said there was nothing? There was so much pain. My husband again called the clinic to ask them what to do and how to help me all while trying to sort through his own shock for the loss of a child we had already named. “She should take paracetamol.” Good mothers-to-be get Lamaze classes and epidurals. Bad mothers-to-be are told to take Tylenol. I went to work the next day. Figuring out how not to go somehow seemed harder.

Society holds that the “natural” work of women is to be mothers (Çoban 2022; Hennekam and Shymko 2020). The ideal mother-to-be does not struggle to have a successful pregnancy (Earle and Letherby 2007), and she only experiences happiness (Schmidt et al. 2023). Celebrated within the media (Husbands 2008) and no longer confined to the home or child-oriented spaces (Tyler 2011), there is a growing acceptance and normalization in the west of publicly displayed pregnant bodies including in the workplace. But the public has “very specific notions of what kind of ‘motherhood’ they will support” (Davis 2004, 70). Pregnant women are quickly faced with unachievable dominant discourses of the good mother-to-be, promoting guilt and leading women to self-label as bad mothers (Staneva et al. 2017). Ideal pregnant bodies should be the right size and shape (Bergmeier et al. 2020; Schmidt et al. 2023), free from disabilities (Betterton 2006; Spradley 2023), and contribute to neoliberal society by continuing to work and shop as much as possible (Lupu 2021; Tyler 2011; Whiley et al. 2021). An ideal pregnant body does not suffer from depression or mental illness: her “embodied discomfort just another expectation of mothers” (Kinloch and Jaworska 2021, 22).

Amidst these pressures, N. L. Johnson et al. (2020) use the term mother wisdom to describe “the body of knowledge and good judgment gained through storytelling among mothers as they develop their motherhood identity” (654). Motivations are often grounded in “(1) a sense of responsibility to share one’s story to normalize a variety of birth experiences and to listen to learn about birth, (2) empowering women, and (3) seeking validation” (N. L. Johnson et al. 2020, 649). Though relational, storytelling also helps mothers internally to integrate and make sense of an identity changing event (Callister 2004). But some stories are more welcome than others. Kay et al. (2017) criticize the nonideal pregnancy “horror stories”:

> Moving forward women need to be encouraged to seek out and share positive stories and be told how powerful these stories can be in reinforcing women's capacity to birth. Women must be given the tools to appreciate the potential of birth to be something other than a drama in today's childbearing world.

(p. 10)

N. L. Johnson et al. (2020) take a more inclusive approach, describing how women may share their stories to counter the “silencing and bias in the dominant discourse for a ‘gentler’ more monochromatic portrayal of bringing life into the world” (662).

But what about the stories when life is not brought into this world, when mothers and fathers are “child free,”¹ violently violating norms around being an ideal parent? Losing a baby not only involves the loss of the mother identity but in particular, the loss of what Murphy (2012) calls the identity of “moral mother.” Self-stigma leads to feelings of failure, guilt, and self-blame, of being a bad parent which then leads to isolation and silence (Murphy 2019; Rogers 2020; Kiguli et al. 2015). The lack of norms or cultural scripts (Frost et al. 2007; Gilbert et al. 2023; Quick 2021) around pregnancy loss that might otherwise help “ease the transition from life to death and back to life” (Reinharz 1988, 100) no doubt stems from the stigma and silencing of these experiences (Simelela 2024). The lack of social spaces to share stories around
pregnancy loss prevents those experiencing this first or third
personally to make sense of what has happened (Hardy and
Kukla 2015) while also preventing the social construction of
knowledge so that others who do not share or yet share this
experience remain ignorant.

## 3.2 | Violating Ideal Worker Norms

The day after my first miscarriage, I taught for 8 h. The day after that, I had time to call my OB/GYN. The assistant answered and said she could see the information on my chart and that I should come in to be looked at by the doctor. She gave me the possible appointment times. They all conflicted with my teaching schedule. I tried to explain to her that I work, I have a job! “Madame,” she said, “Don’t you think you need to be seen by a doctor?” I could not answer her as I was hit with a wall of emotion. I could not breathe let alone talk as the tears streamed down my face and my body shook. I hung up the phone as the only way I could physically respond. Trying to find a solution, my husband later called our general practitioner who was able to get me in at a time when I did not have to teach. Close to a week after my miscarriage, I was finally checked by a doctor to make sure “nothing” remained in my uterus to cause problems.

I did not even have to tell anyone at work that I miscarried. I
could have just called in sick. Why didn't I? Canceling classes is
a nightmare. It involves heroic efforts on the part of admin as-
sistants to reschedule hundreds of students with conflicting
schedules or obliging already overburdened colleagues to fill in.
I did not want to be a burden. I did not want to make things
complicated for others, and I did not feel like I could afford to. I
was still in my probationary period.

But I admit, there was something else. If I went to work, I could
pretend that nothing had happened. I could ignore my trauma,
ignore my body. And if I could not be a good mother, I could at
least be a good worker. I still had that.

I got pregnant again, I miscarried again. I began to suspect that 8-h teaching days and being a good worker might be keeping me from being a good mother even as the medical literature told me none of this was my fault. I passed the probationary period. When I got pregnant the third time, I emailed my manager, I could not imagine actually talking to her face to face! I wrote that I could not teach over contract hours for the second semester, disclosing both my pregnancy and my miscarriages. Teaching over contract hours was not something I had chosen to do but was pressured to do especially as someone on a probationary contract. There is always too much work and not enough people to do it.

At first, she accepted and curtly expressed back by email that
she was sorry for my loss. A couple of weeks later, she walked
into my office to say "Unfortunately there is no plan B. We need
you to teach these hours." I could not talk, I could not say no. If
I did, I would cry, and I absolutely could not let my body do that
at work. I simply nodded.

I was “lucky.” By French law, all new, permanent employees had to visit the labor nurse for an initial evaluation. I was forced to talk to her. She saw my miscarriages and my current pregnancy. I told

her my teaching hours, she looked shocked. She was on my side. She told me I could go on medical leave if they continued to pressure me to over-teach, she would write me the letter. I emailed this threat to my manager, phrased as passively as possible: "The school nurse has unfortunately informed me that given my previous miscarriages, working over contract hours is a medical risk for my current pregnancy...." My manager backed off. My extra hours went to adjunct faculty. I was not an ideal worker, but this time I carried my baby to full term.

Both pregnancy and pregnancy loss are stigmatized in the workplace (Gilbert et al. 2023; Billotte Verhoff and Buzzanell 2022), creating a problem of double disclosure (Bute et al. 2019). Because expecting a baby, or trying for a baby, violates ideal worker norms rooted in masculine bodies, many potential parents delay informing their colleagues or managers that they are pregnant (Billotte Verhoff and Buzzanell 2022; K. Jones 2016). There is the normative silence of the “12-Week Rule” in which one is supposed to wait until it is “safe” to share based on confidence in pregnancy viability (Billotte Verhoff and Buzzanell 2022; Bute et al. 2019; Sabat et al. 2021). Some women only tell when their pregnancy is so far along that it becomes impossible to hide (Billotte Verhoff and Buzzanell 2022; K. Jones 2016). Loss before these critical passages is often simply not shared.

Keep et al.'s (2023) study found that parents-to-be may be reluctant to disclose loss because of feelings that it is too personal for the workplace, worries about career progression, especially for those with precarious employment status, and fear of hurtful comments. Hurtful comments from coworkers may intend to be caring but can disenfranchise grief such as “At least you know you can get pregnant.” Coworkers may also minimize others' grief due to wrong assumptions that parental attachment occurs after a baby is born (Hazen 2003; Weaver-Hightower 2012). Society links pregnancy loss with abortion and hurtful comments may also stem from beliefs that the loss is caused by something the mother did (Bardos et al. 2015; Frost et al. 2007; Reiheld 2015).

Although many potential parents understandably keep silent in the workplace, there are many reasons that others speak up. One of these is to confront and challenge stigma. Keep et al. (2023) found that women may share as a way to shape workplace culture around pregnancy loss as something that “should be talked about” (263). Indeed, their research shows that supportive workplace cultures can empower women to tell their stories. Women may also choose to disclose their loss as a way to find emotional support from colleagues though this can still be negatively oriented such as sharing as a way to avoid triggers, for example, to discourage colleagues from talking about their own pregnancies (Keep et al. 2023). In this way, de-silencing pregnancy loss may at times come at the expense of silencing positive experiences of pregnancy. Disclosure may also feel coerced when it is needed to access bereavement or medical leave leading many to just not take it (Donaghy et al. 2024; Keep et al. 2023).

## 3.3 | Violating Ideal Researcher Norms

At a work social event, a fellow academic shared that she had lost a baby, and I was so inspired by how she was able to talk
about it. I could sense her emotion, but the words were still able to come out of her mouth. I wanted to challenge the silencing of our experiences, but how when I physically cannot talk about it? She encouraged me to write instead. Why not an academic paper? Just not an auto-ethnography though, she said. Even if she found them “powerful” she did not think of them as “really scientific.” The remark reminded me of a workshop I had attended years before on conducting organizational ethnography. The presenter told us to avoid auto-ethnography, describing it as “embarrassing.” This essay then did not start out as a personal narrative but slowly slipped into one in an uneasy process. The issue was not only the vulnerability of sharing that this had happened to me but the stigma of becoming an “unscientific” academic.

If not auto-ethnography, I tried to figure out how one is supposed to do “proper” research on pregnancy loss in the workplace. Qualitative surveys are a no. I have seen colleagues and reviewers shun them for not being relational, not being feminist, or simply not being “enough.” In a paper development workshop, someone remarked to me quietly after seeing a proposal on using digital ethnography to study pregnancy loss, “How can you capture grief in an online post?” while insisting conducting narrative interviews is the only real way. Later, that same person told me that a member of their ethics committee had told them “you’ll never get it approved.” As I read more in the methods literature, I began to realize that there is no way to be a “good” pregnancy loss researcher.

Pregnancy loss falls under the category of sensitive research. What is sensitive in sensitive research relates first to “the inherent sensitive or taboo qualities of the research topic itself” and second to “the methodological and practical means of sensitively addressing such ‘sensitive’ issues” (Mallon et al. 2021, 518). In describing how to “actually do” sensitive research, Dickson-Swift et al. (2008) explains that “We go into other people’s lives, sometimes at a time of crisis and stress, and we ask them to talk in detail about their experiences” (33). By its nature, sensitive research often implies a high risk of mental and moral harm for both research subjects and researchers (Karcher et al. 2024; Mallon et al. 2021). Although the use of textual data, such as asynchronous online focus groups, qualitative surveys, or secondary data, has been identified as a way to alleviate some of these pressures (Hardy and Kukla 2015; MacNamara et al. 2021; Mealer and Jones 2014), the ideal sensitive researcher understands that responding sensitively requires being physically there, face-to-face (Dickson-Swift et al. 2008; Liamputtong 2007) despite the emotional labor this requires (Hubbard et al. 2001; K. Jones and Murphy 2021). Even more forbidden, positivist approaches such as quantitative surveys are simply anti-feminist (Dickson-Swift et al. 2008; Liamputtong 2007). In academia, the label of “bad feminist” comes easily it seems (Weatherall 2020; Whiley et al. 2021).

There is a strong link between sensitive research and personally relevant research (Mallon and Elliott 2021). Personally relevant research can be defined “as research that addresses questions in which scholars are personally invested or that involves a population to which they belong or in which they hold a personal interest” (E. B. Jones and Bartunek 2021, 2). For some, this personal interest is seen as enabling researchers to ask more

relevant questions, make better connections with participants, and develop superior insights leading to more impactful research (Greenberg et al. 2021; E. B. Jones and Bartunek 2021). For others, being “too close to one’s work” is seen as forfeiting objectivity and therefore research quality: personally relevant research is “taboo” (E. B. Jones and Bartunek 2021; Mallon and Elliott 2021). The mainstream ideal researcher is indeed rooted in the Cartesian dualism that minds are separate from bodies and that openness to subjectivity risks “contaminating” the data (Dickson-Swift et al. 2008). This is especially true within the fields of organizational and management research (Borcori 2017; Greenberg et al. 2021; Pérezts 2022; Hudson and Okhuysen 2014).

Whether mainstream or feminist, ideal researchers do not harm their participants. On the contrary, Denzin (1997) describes the ideal researcher as “a morally involved, self-aware, self-reflexive and interacting individual who holds the self personally responsible for the political and ethical consequences of their actions” (277). In pregnancy loss research, harm may occur both through the emotional trauma of telling these stories, though this can also be cathartic (Dickson-Swift et al. 2007; Frost et al. 2007; Ndlovu 2024), and also in the more macro-level consequences of the research itself which has been less explored. Earle and Blackburn (2021) rightfully point out that when “research has already been defined (by others and by us) as ‘sensitive’”, we in fact “(re)construct and (re)enforce the ‘sensitive’ nature of it” (543) despite intentions of normalizing. Indeed, sensitive researchers often make choices on terminology that can be both emotionally and politically charged (Shantz and Byrne 2022). Words like “loss,” “baby,” “death,” or “parents” may acknowledge the status and grief of the people who identify with these terms but alienate and force grief onto others who do not. Politically, such terms can also be used to infer support for a range of causes including anti-abortion (Hoggart 2021; Reinharz 1988). Even when sensitive research projects are abandoned, “The very fact that a researcher poses a particular theory or research question can have major social implications” (Sieber and Stanley 1988, 50).

Given this link to harm, ethics committees and review boards are less likely to approve sensitive research (Karcher et al. 2024; Sieber and Stanley 1988). Borgstrom and Ellis (2021) argue that “striving to attain this ideal and to meet their ethical responsibilities within a complicated regulatory context proliferating with guidelines, policies and procedures, which direct and delineate what ‘good’ (correct) research looks like” (8) gets “under the skin” (14). In line with Sampson et al. (2008), they create the term internalizing sensitivity to describe how introspection around sensitivity and vulnerability becomes problematic and harmful as it reinforces the “moral judication of the research or the researcher” (Borgstrom and Ellis 2021, 20). Dickson-Swift et al. (2008) calls it an “ethical hangover” (50).

From initial research funders at the start of the process to journal reviewers toward the end, demands from mainstream and post-positivist-leaning fields to conduct pregnancy loss research in ways that are “rigorous” (e.g., longitudinally) and that limit error (e.g., recall bias) can conflict with ethical concerns around harm (e.g., attempting to survey participants amid a pregnancy loss or capturing them through a pregnancy
survey). Personal narratives and auto-ethnographies bypass some of the moral harms of conducting empirical research “on” participants by personally assuming the burden of sharing one’s story, though it certainly does not eliminate harm (Lahman 2009). We instead “submit to the researcher’s gaze that we are trained to point on others. Opening oneself, as a researcher, to the vulnerability that we might ask of outside research participants” (Porschitz and Siler 2017, 569). Indeed, personal narratives and auto-ethnographies “out” us (Hales and Galbally 2023), at times as moral failures, by the less than ideal identities we reveal. Ribbens and Edwards (1997) capture the ethical tensions when reflecting on where to set the limits of self-revelation:

> Does this mean we are looking for an openness from our research participants that we are not prepared to show about ourselves? Or are we really in a different position since we are the embodiment of the edges between public and private worlds, and there is no one else to give us the protection of anonymity that we offer our research participants within the public knowledge forum?

Pregnancy loss researchers do not seem to have many options to do this the “right” way. We are torn between two unachievable less than ideal ideals: the distant mainstream management researcher and the self-flagellating reflexive feminist researcher. In terms of participant welfare, it is not just a question of getting formal approval for the work but moral approval for you as a person. There is harm in this research even when there is also empowerment. Given not only the stigma around the topic, but also the methods, I do wonder how many research projects on pregnancy loss simply never made it past the ideation stage.

# 4 | Theoretical Implications and Discussion

Hazen (2003) writes that:

> To heal from perinatal loss, a mother connects with her body and feelings; connects with her child physically or symbolically; and connects her child and herself with the social environment. The workplace is becoming an important part of women's community life. Some of these connections can and should be made through work.

(p. 163)

The workplace, however, continues to be a social space of not-knowledge creation. Ignorance of pregnancy loss manifests at the individual level through a lack of supportive managers and colleagues (Gilbert et al. 2023; Griffiths 2021; Hazen 2003; Keep et al. 2023) and at the organizational level as a lack of supportive policies (Donaghy et al. 2024; Mumford et al. 2023; Obst et al. 2022; Plagg et al. 2024). Though some countries, such as New Zealand, have enacted legislation to provide for workers experiencing pregnancy loss (Calder 2022), there is still a lack of legislated employment protections including paid leave and accommodations especially for early pregnancy losses and for

both parents (Kessler 2022; Kelly-Harrington et al. 2024; Middlemiss et al. 2024). These options not only should be there, but people should feel comfortable taking them without fear of stigma or of being a burden.

Organizational and management scholars can contribute to this development; however, the subject remains sensitive. In the words of Sieber and Stanley (1988), “although there is nothing that forbids research on sensitive topics, there are powerful forces working against the conduct of such research” (49). What motivates someone then to undertake sensitive research is an important topic that has received little attention in the methods literature (Mallon and Elliott 2021), though a sense of responsibility to help vulnerable individuals and shape a more caring society seems to play a key role (E. B. Jones and Bartnek 2021; Karcher et al. 2024). This question could be asked differently though: What keeps someone from undertaking sensitive research?

## 4.1 | Stigma Entanglement and the Epistemic Vulnerability Paradox

Grounded in my embodied experience of pregnancy loss and its shift from something that happened to me at work to becoming my work, I first contribute to the pregnancy loss in the workplace, personally relevant, and social construction of knowledge literatures by revealing an epistemic vulnerability paradox, as seen in Figure 1, to explain the persistence of knowledge taboos. The paradox begins with the violation of norms creating a vulnerability to stigmatization. This stigma has a silencing effect and thus creates a knowledge taboo. For Baghramian et al. (2020), knowledge is needed to flourish and fulfill goals, and when knowledge is not available, it leaves an epistemic need. Drawing on ethics of care as a theory and practice, C. R. Johnson (2020) argues that “epistemic vulnerabilities that come from having basic and legitimate epistemic needs generate moral obligations for those who are well-positioned to meet this need” (684). She

<figure><img src="image_4.png" /><figcaption>**FIGURE 1** | The epistemic vulnerability paradox and the social construction of not-knowledge.</figcaption></figure>
uses the term epistemic care work to refer to meeting these obligations.

Engaging in this epistemic care, however, is problematic as it links the researcher, and potentially their institution or publishing journal, to violating norms, rendering them vulnerable to stigmatizing processes in which they may become “contaminated.” To fulfill a moral epistemic duty, to create needed yet taboo knowledge, researchers must expose themselves to the very stigma and harm that caused the knowledge to become silenced and taboo in the first place. This potential for harm is even more true for those engaging in personally relevant research. Perversely, if the argument for personally relevant research is that it leads to better, more impactful research (Greenberg et al. 2021; E. B. Jones and Bartunek 2021), then researchers who share stigmatizing attributes or experiences with subjects arguably have a stronger moral obligation to meet these epistemic needs even as their own vulnerability is heightened. Noting how women and members of marginalized groups often take on a larger burden of epistemic care work, C. R. Johnson (2023) states, however, that we are not obligated to self-sacrifice in order to meet the epistemic needs of vulnerable others. We are then morally freed from doing what is morally required, and ignorance remains.

Epistemic vulnerability paradoxes are a relational phenomenon resulting here from the entanglement of stigmas within a research assemblage that contains not only the (naturalized, sexualized, racialized) researchers and their methods (Cozza and Gherardi 2023) but also the “specific instantiations and expressions of taboos from the broader culture brought into the research enterprise” (Hudson and Okhuysen 2014, 245). Gatekeeping within this epistemological system occurs progressively where “well-meaning mentors” may discourage authors from exploring stigmatized populations, activities, or organizations (Hudson and Okhuysen 2014), ethics boards may refuse research projects in which participants are asked about traumatic experiences (Ndlovu 2024), and academic journal editors and reviewers may reject “what must be kept out” (Prasad 2016, 441). Particularly within business-academia, journals may view work on stigmatized groups as activism only rather than legitimate research on people worthy of study (Hudson and Okhuysen 2014). There may also be perceptions that finding reviewers for these “niche” topics may be difficult. These acts of epistemic exclusion are a silencing and “an unwarranted infringement on the epistemic agency of a knower, which reduces [their] ability to participate in the production of knowledge” (Dotson 2014, 123), that is, prevents them from engaging in epistemic care work.

## 4.2 | Resisting the Pursuit of Invulnerability in Research

Not-knowledge is socially reinforced in a paradoxical construction process not based in vulnerability. I argue, but the pursuit of invulnerability. My second contribution then is to propose embracing vulnerability to work through this paradox. Gilson (2011) rejects the idea of vulnerability as being “susceptible, exposed, at risk, in danger... to be somehow weaker,

defenseless and dependent, open to harm and injury” (Gilson 2011, 310). Instead, she describes vulnerability as “a basic kind of openness to being affected and affecting in both positive and negative ways, which can take diverse forms in different social situations” (Gilson 2011, 310). Being vulnerable, she argues, is the only way one can be harmed but also the only way one can be benefited.

The foundation of research ethics is to do no harm, but this may be inevitable with sensitive topics (Connor et al. 2018; Wiles et al. 2007). The rejection of such research by ethics boards (Karcher et al. 2024; Sieber and Stanley 1988) can then be understood as a pursuit of invulnerability. Conducting social research is complex and does not lend itself to universal moral principles even though ethics boards are increasingly using standardized, regulatory approaches (Miller and Bell 2013). To counter this trend, Truman (2003) suggests a shift from harm reduction to well-being as a basis of research ethics while Connor et al. (2018) proposes social empowerment. These perspectives align with the idea that care is not only a reaction to suffering but also a source of agency, recognizing that empowerment through caring *with* is central to interconnected relationships with varying power dynamics (Fan and Cunliffe 2024; Tronto 2013).

For Block (2024), epistemic caring does not “stipulate specific guidelines such as empowerment, but seeks rather to sensitize scientific participants to how they and others are interwoven with each other in the various dimensions of the co-constitution of knowledge” (15). This co-constitution of knowledge opens the possibility of encounters in which we are touched by the other, but as she notes “Touch can hurt and touch can heal” (13). Emphasizing the intra-dependent vulnerability of care relations, she argues, “free[s] the concept of care from its connotation of innocence” (Block 2024, 13). Indeed, ethics of care has long struggled to address care that may also entail harm (Reed 2024; Antoni et al. 2020), but it has never positioned itself as a theory or practice of idealism (C. R. Johnson 2023). Evaluating research harm through a lens of care that seeks well-being and empowerment rather than harm reduction or elimination may help address these ethical tensions.

## 4.3 | From Harm to Empowerment

Dickson-Swift et al. (2008) note that “If researchers continually remove reference to the realities of the research process from their writings, the difficulties associated with doing research, particularly on sensitive topics, are likely to remain hidden” (23). Writing this paper has, at times, felt harmful, making it difficult in a way that is far different from anything I have written before. Conducing the literature review, being “touched” by the experiences of others, I felt re-traumatized as I was forcefully reminded of what happened to me. Throughout the process, there has been a constant worry about others “finding out” and the consequences of that. Although embracing this vulnerability has been harmful, it has also been healing and empowering. By slowly un-ignoring my trauma through this paper, I am working through my grief. My grief will always be there, the hurt and harm will always be there, but it is becoming easier to talk about it, even at work. I understand vulnerability here as both an existential condition and
"an epistemic attitude, considering the embodied and affective dimensions of knowing" (Kaasila-Pakanen et al. 2024, 277).

It is important to reflect on what has empowered my openness to vulnerability. It has been 8 years since I first miscarried, so there is the passage of time. My son who was born, my “rainbow baby,”<fnref n="2" /> will be turning six soon. I do not know if I could write this without having had him, without being “out the other side” (Griffiths 2021, 403). For me, it became easier to say I miscarried after being able to say I fully carried. I have been both the nonideal and ideal pregnant woman. Although my intention in stating this is to acknowledge my privilege and draw attention to my own cowardice as evidence of pressures for “hushing up” (Frost et al. 2007, 1019), I realize that I am also reinforcing the dangerous idea that only people with positive pregnancy stories should speak up (Kay et al. 2017). I am also yet another white, western woman in academia sharing her experience of the world. I cannot speak for others. Does my voice silence someone else’s? Paradoxically, what has given me strength to share is also a reason to not share. Indeed, internalizing sensitivity can be a block (Borgstrom and Ellis 2021), but perhaps rightfully so.

I do not think I would have written this essay if others had not done so first (Allen and Craven 2020; Boncori and Smith 2019; Forhan 2010; Griffiths 2021; Okamoto 2023; Reinharz 1988; Weaver-Hightower 2012; Porschitz and Siler 2017; Lahman 2009; Pérezts 2022) and if GWO was not already a safe place for such topics written about in such ways (Ozkazanc-Pan 2024; Tekeste and Ozbilgin 2024). Women's bodies are “dirty” (Whiley et al. 2023). Sharing personal stories is “dirty” (Hales and Galbally 2023). But GWO is a space where “bad” feminists (Weatherall 2020; Whiley et al. 2021) can publish “dirty” things. Epistemic care is an act of collective self-care (Morris et al. 2023). Far from being “embarrassing,” writing this paper has been empowering. There has been far more encouragement than discouragement ranging from colleagues sharing back their own fertility or pregnancy loss experiences, both women and men, to expressions that this is an important topic, keep going. It has been a space for me to make sense of my pregnancy losses while providing meaning to my work as a researcher.

## 5 | Limitations and Areas for Future Research

Although women's experience of pregnancy loss is limited, there are others for whom the research is even more silent. Pregnancy loss is something that happens not only to those who carry but to everyone in the family (Forhan 2010; Porschitz and Siler 2017; Kiguli et al. 2015). Noncarrying parents, who may be men, women, or nonbinary, are close to but ultimately removed from maternal bodies making them even less visible (Allen and Craven 2020; Mumford et al. 2023; Reiheld 2015). The few studies on men and pregnancy loss affirm that they also grieve and suffer parallel experiences of anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder (Brier 2008; Farren et al. 2018; Weaver-Hightower 2012). Men, however, face even stronger normative pressures to not “talk about it” and instead be “stoic, silent, and resilient” (Bute et al. 2019, 14). Fitting within a larger, gendered view of parenting, the role of men is to support the grieving

woman leading to the marginalization and invisibility of their own pain (Bute et al. 2019; Due et al. 2017; Obst et al. 2022) with medical staff often reinforcing this secondary role (Martins et al. 2023). Furthermore, infertility has received even less consideration in the literature (Cervi and Brewis 2022; Grifiths 2021) with men again suffering perhaps even greater levels of stigma and silence (Hanna and Gough 2020). Finally, miscarriage risk intersects with race and socioeconomic status among others, yet studies involving minoritized groups is limited (Lens 2020; Maloney et al. 2024). There is clearly a need for more research that encompasses the wide range of experiences of the struggle to have a child.

More broadly, Franken et al. (2024) note how the tendency to individualize vulnerability limits possibilities of collective resistance or solidarity. Additional work is needed to explore how both formal and informal workplace processes and policies may collectivize vulnerability as a form of solidarity and resistance to external social practices of marginalization. The workplace is an inherently organized environment where desigtmatization processes around employee groups, such as racial minorities, LGBTQ+ individuals (Reed 2017), or menopausal women (Quental et al. 2023), can ripple out to the societal level. This essay then sits within larger discourses calling for us to reimagine business as a source of care rather than merely economic production (Reed 2024; The Care Collective et al. 2020; Antoni et al. 2020) and envisioning research as epistemic justice work rooted in ethics of care (Morris et al. 2023).

### Acknowledgments

The author has nothing to report.

### Conflicts of Interest

The author declares no conflicts of interest.

### Data Availability Statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author. The data are not publicly available due to privacy or ethical restrictions.

### Endnotes

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<footnote n="1">¹The use of the phrase “child free” is to link with the terminology used in the special issue. I acknowledge that people who have experienced pregnancy loss may not identify with this phrase at all, others completely, and some may be in-between with very conflicting thoughts and feelings about it. Not everyone who experiences pregnancy loss may feel like they have lost a child, and that is entirely ok.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">²A rainbow baby is a colloquial term for a healthy baby born after the experience of pregnancy loss (Smith et al. 2018).</footnote>
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