Ideal Workers within an Inequality Regime: Examining the Parental Leave Experiences of Women in STEM Doctoral Programs

This article examines how the enactment of parental leave policy for parenting women in STEM doctoral programs upholds intersecting inequalities that construct the ideal worker. We employ organizational inequality theory within a narrative analysis to examine how policy is lived by women in STEM doctoral programs. The study uses qualitative narrative analysis on interview data from four women in STEM PhD programs at a large public research-focused university in the United States. We find that (1) women’s experiences accessing and taking parental leave present sites of intersectional inequality and conflict with ideal worker norms, and (2) the implementation of paid leave policy in concert with other procedures served as a source of inequality. This study makes a theoretical contribution to the higher education work-life literature by taking an intersectional approach to policy-based inequality and an empirical contribution by focusing on an often-overlooked group in the work-life literature: women in STEM graduate education.