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Balancing two journeys

Motherhood and scholarship have long been spoken of as if they belong to two separate worlds: one personal, and the other intellectual. But for many women, motherhood and scholarship overlap in profound, life-changing ways. Motherhood can bring new depths of empathy, perspective and resilience that enrich academic work (Acker & Armenti, 2004). The question is whether universities are ready to create environments where these qualities are recognised and valued, rather than overlooked or treated in isolation.

The ‘PhD journey’ is often pictured as the life of a student surrounded by stacks of books, spending long nights at the library, and finally submitting after years of hard work. Yet that image rarely includes swollen feet, maternity appointments, or the emotional demands of carrying a new life while completing an academic project. For many women, pregnancy and motherhood overlap with doctoral study and that reality deserves acknowledgment.

Carrying a thesis and a child

I submitted my thesis just before I became pregnant. My viva took place when I was one month pregnant, and I graduated in my ninth month, just one week before giving birth. While I wasn’t raising a baby during my PhD, I was growing one during the final hurdles of my doctoral journey, and that brought its own challenges.

I received three months of corrections after my viva, which meant revising and resubmitting my thesis while navigating pregnancy symptoms and the physical demands of my changing body. It was an intense, exhausting time, filled with both the excitement of motherhood and the pressure of academic deadlines.

‘The standard processes for submission and corrections often overlook the physical and emotional realities of pregnancy.’

Looking back, what stands out is how rarely pregnancy and doctoral timelines are spoken about together. The standard processes for submission and corrections often overlook the physical and emotional realities of pregnancy. I was fortunate to have supportive supervisors, but doctoral systems more broadly could respond with greater flexibility to different life circumstances. Pregnancy, after all, is not an interruption to scholarship but part of the complex lives that many researchers navigate.

Mothering through a thesis

While my own experience did not include parenting alongside the PhD, I watched close friends battle through their theses while raising children. Their stories of exhaustion, resilience and sacrifice highlight something academia needs to hear. One friend spoke about writing chapters at night after putting her baby to bed, only to wake up every few hours for feeding. Another described searching for a coworking space that offered childcare because childcare was unaffordable.

For them, the milestone of ‘submission’ was not only about intellectual achievement but about surviving a relentless juggle between scholarship and motherhood (Tabaeva & Durrani, 2025; Mason et al., 2023; Acker & Armenti, 2004).

Breaking the myth of the perfect PhD student

These experiences reveal a tension at the heart of higher education: doctoral programmes are still designed around an idealised student with no dependents, full availability and boundless energy. For mothers, this is simply not the reality. The silence around parenting in doctoral study can leave women feeling isolated, as if their struggles are private inconveniences rather than structural issues that deserve recognition.

Doctoral mothers’ resilience is extraordinary, but universities must do more than rely on it. Flexible submission deadlines, accessible childcare provision and clearer policies for pregnant doctoral researchers would go a long way. Beyond policy, what is needed most is a cultural shift: a recognition that doctoral students who are also mothers are not detached from life commitments but are whole people navigating multiple roles. Ignoring that reality risks reinforcing exclusion, as talented researchers are pushed out of academia because the system wasn’t built with them in mind (Hong et al., 2025).

Towards inclusive academia

I may not have written my thesis while raising a child, but I carried my baby across the finish line of my PhD. And I stand in solidarity with all the doctoral mothers who continue to write, research and parent against the odds. Their stories, our stories, are reminders that academia must evolve if it is to truly include and empower women.

Doctoral mothers are not exceptions. They are part of academia’s future. It is time universities recognised that and adapted.

References

Acker, S., & Armenti, C. (2004). Sleepless in academia. Gender and Education, 16(1), 3–24.

Hong, J., Zheng, H., Yuan, L., & Ni, C. (2025). Parenthood penalties in academia: Childcare responsibilities, gender role beliefs and institutional support. arXiv preprint, arXiv:2504.13923.

Mason, S., Bond, M., & Ledger, S. (2023). How motherhood enhances and strains doctoral research/ers

Tabaeva, A., & Durrani, N. (2025). Exploring the experiences of doctoral student mothers: A comparative study of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. In A. Kuzhabekova, A. Armin, & N. Durrani (Eds.), Gender and education in Central Asia (pp. 171–197). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-75301-5_8