Insights into challenges of single motherhood in academia: cases from Lithuania, Türkiye and United Kingdom

This study examines the lived experiences of mothers and single mothers working in academia, exploring how gendered and institutional structures influence their everyday realities. Through an autoethnographic and phenomenological approach, it analyses three first-person narratives from academic women from three different cultures: the United Kingdom, Türkiye and Lithuania, each negotiating the competing demands of care, research, and teaching within unequal labour conditions. By combining semiotic text analysis and phenomenological anthropology, the study reveals how structural discrimination becomes embodied as guilt, exhaustion, and misrecognition, yet also how women reconfigure these experiences into resilience, creativity, and solidarity. The findings highlight recurring tensions between care and career, voice and silence, belonging and othering – showing that universities, while appearing meritocratic, might indulge hidden discriminating patterns. The research contributes to feminist academic discourse by demonstrating the epistemological value of lived experience as knowledge and by outlining pathways toward inclusive, family-friendly, and intersectionally aware academic environments.