“I Want to be Both, but Is that Possible?”: Communicating Mother-Scholar Uncertainty During Doctoral Candidacy

Abstract

Doctoral study is a vulnerable time when students are faced with the task of establishing a new professional identity in a competitive environment, with financial stress, an uncertain future, and low status. This significant period of uncertainty is a particularly ripe context for higher education researchers to explore, as it simultaneously falls during important family formation and childbearing years. Through in-depth, semistructured interviews of 30 married women doctoral candidates, largely within the humanities and social sciences and the lens of uncertainty management theory, this investigation examines how women construct and manage uncertainty surrounding the mother-scholar identity.