When women meet the abstract student: academic-family conflict among women pursuing doctoral studies

This study examines how female doctoral students navigate the tensions between academic demands and family responsibilities. Open-ended responses from an online questionnaire completed by 209 women doctoral students from 28 Chilean universities were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis. Participants described academic-family conflict as being associated with demanding workloads, limited institutional support, caregiving responsibilities, reliance on family networks, and individual coping strategies. Institutional measures were often informal and dependent on faculty disposition rather than established policies. Drawing on Acker's theory of gendered organizations, we interpret these findings as reflecting an “abstract student” model organized around continuous availability and limited recognition of caregiving responsibilities. Rather than solely constituting individual difficulties in balancing academic and family life, these tensions are shaped by organizational arrangements that privatize reconciliation and may reproduce gender inequality within doctoral education.