Juggling Multiple Demands: Resilience of Women in Doctoral Studies

This study investigates the pluralistic experiences of women doctoral students and their strategies for managing “bumpy moments” during doctoral candidature in a major Australian university. It builds upon a growing body of literature on doctoral attrition, female students’ experiences, and gender equality, which shows that although a PhD journey profoundly foregrounds the intellectual trajectories of doctoral students, their academic pursuit is inevitably entangled with often gendered disadvantages that are experienced by female doctoral students. Therefore, navigating a doctoral study can be challenging in particular aspects for women when they are embedded in multiple configurations of cultural, social, institutional, and family structures. In this chapter, we adopted a qualitative case study methodology to provide an in-depth account of the PhD journeys of five female doctoral students in a research-intensive university in Australia. Drawing on the concept of resilience, this research presents the participants’ perceived inter-role hardships in relation to time and how the female doctoral students mobilised and harnessed internal and external resources to juggle different roles, successfully responding to multiple social and institutional demands imposed upon them.