“Am I Doing Enough?”: Exploring How Neoliberal Discourses Inform Women Doctoral Students’ Experiences in Biology

While women make up over half of doctoral students in the biological sciences, that number decreases as they progress through academic job rankings. The “leaky pipeline” and other metaphors have been used to describe the underrepresentation of women in STEM, but these metaphors fail to address how institutional structures, such as policies, practices, and discourses, inform the inequities women experience in graduate school and beyond. In this institutional ethnography, we sought to uncover how institutional structures informed doctoral women’s experiences in biology. Using in-depth interviews and the analysis of institutional texts, we uncovered how neoliberal discourses (e.g., productivity, competition, and accountability) underlie the institutional structures that inform women’s experiences in biology and created points of tension for the participants. This study documents how women centered their work on maximizing research productivity, but struggled to keep up with their other responsibilities that were unrecognized. This study points to how we should reconsider success in academia and encourage creative ways to meet expectations within graduate education.