Navigating academia as immigrant women: a duoethnographic inquiry into barriers, belonging, and becoming

Purpose Women in academia face distinct challenges, particularly in terms of access, inclusion and representation. These challenges can be even more pronounced for immigrant women, who must navigate additional barriers related to cultural adaptation, language and systemic biases. Design/methodology/approach This duoethnographic study explores the lived experiences of two immigrant women in academia – an Irish doctoral student and an Indian American tenured faculty member – whose existing mentoring relationship enabled this collaborative inquiry. Duoethnography, a dialogic qualitative method, not only facilitated critical reflection on personal narratives but also served as a co-mentoring tool, fostering reciprocal learning and deeper engagement with identity, belonging and professional challenges. Findings The findings reveal how immigrant women in academia navigate complex intersections of identity, institutional belonging and stereotype threat. Societal and familial expectations shape their professional identities, often leading to pressures of overperformance and emotional labor. Power dynamics further complicate their experiences, with structural barriers such as inequitable policies, exclusion from informal networks and expectations of unpaid mentorship. The findings illustrate how duoethnography fosters collaborative meaning-making, reflexivity and mutual empowerment. Originality/value This study challenges traditional narratives on diversity in academia by illustrating a nuanced understanding of the barriers immigrant women face, which are often overlooked in broader gender equity discussions. By including the perspective of a White immigrant, this study expands the discourse on immigrant identity, highlighting how racial privilege intersects with cultural displacement in ways that are rarely addressed in immigration studies. Duoethnography captures raw, reflexive and deeply personal insights that quantitative studies or standard interviews fail to uncover, making visible the complexities of both racialized and non-racialized immigrant experiences in academia.