Gender, agency, and time use among doctorate holders: The case of Iceland

Abstract

This article investigates how doctorate holders in Iceland make sense of time and utilize their own time management as an instrument in their career development and whether gender is a defining factor in this context. The project is based on 32 semi-structured, in-depth interviews with participants holding 5- to 20-year-old doctorate degrees in Iceland. These interviews were then analyzed using a phenomenological approach. The results indicate that the men generally felt a higher level of agency regarding their work–life balance and time management than did the women, who more often expressed difficulties finding a proper balance and expressed being more stressed about the often fragmented time they had to combine their career and family obligations successfully. The study provides a picture of how societal time norms among highly educated people are very gendered and how time is still inevitably linked to power. The contribution of this study to prior studies is that, even when comparing highly educated people among whom it is more likely to find a higher level of egalitarian attitudes, in a country where gender equality is assumed to be at a higher level than in many other countries, women still seem to experience time differently from men in terms of personal autonomy.