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Background and Purpose: Even though all international students face various challenges, evidence shows that due mainly to differential social, economic, educational, and cultural backgrounds, international students face unique intersecting challenges in American universities. Despite literature showing gender disparities when it comes to such challenges, the experiences of female international students in the US received little attention in research, and most studies focused on the acculturation strategies and attitudes of international students without considering the impact of gender, marriage (family-work balance) and cultural background on their academic performance and success. Guided by feminist theory, work-life spillover theory, and cross-cultural adaptation model, we conducted a qualitative study to answer two research questions: 1) What is it like to be a married female international doctoral student? 2) how do gender and marriage affect the academic roles and engagement of married female international doctoral students?
Methods: Guided by hermeneutic phenomenology, we used in-depth interviews to collect data from 15 married female students doing their PhD at a university in the Midwest region. Following IRB approval, we recruited participants representing various Asian and African countries via purposive and snowball samplings. We analyzed the data using Ajjawi and Higgs’ (2007) hermeneutic phenomenology data analysis method.
Results: Four themes emerged from the data analysis: 1) transnational life through digital homing, 2) negative spillover and intersectionality of challenges, 3) emotional drain, and 4) integration into the host community as a coping strategy.
Conclusions and Implications: Our study revealed that married female international doctoral students face multifaced challenges compounded by culture-specific gender roles, role conflicts, and sociocultural backgrounds that affect their psychological and sociocultural adaptation, academic performance, and engagement. Our study findings entail two key implications:1) As married female international PhD students face multifaceted challenges, they need more supervision, mentorship, and support from their school, professors, and cohort, and 2) As financial hardship is the major challenge faced by married female international students especially those who live with their spouse and children, our findings call for a need to revise visa policy, considering employment authorization for spouses and children of F-1 visa holders.