Amplified (in)visibility: How gender quotas reshape invisible labor and identity in STEM academia

(In)visibility in the workplace—encompassing invisibility, visibility, and hypervisibility—remains a persistent challenge for women working in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields. While previous research has highlighted women's coping strategies in male-dominated contexts, it has often overlooked how external institutional pressures—such as parity laws—intensify the experience of (in)visibility in novel ways. This qualitative study of women faculty working in STEM fields in French public universities, which have state-mandated gender quotas, addresses this gap, examining how these women navigate the cumulative effects of (in)visibility. Our study makes three contributions to the (in)visibility literature: (1) we theorize and empirically show that these quotas produce amplified (in)visibility—a condition that simultaneously increases, distorts, and undermines visibility—generating disproportionate invisible labor and identity strain; (2) the amplified (in)visibility dynamic creates invisible work burdens for women, including cultural taxation and quota-driven intellectual labor; and (3) amplified (in)visibility, as a structural, externally imposed form of (in)visibility not stemming from traditional marginalization but from institutional interventions, leads women to engage in sustained identity work as they seek to reconcile their professional roles with evolving self-understandings, producing outcomes ranging from resilience to identity impasse.