Introduction Doctoral education is increasingly scrutinised for its capacity to support inclusive and sustainable academic futures. Despite policy discourses emphasising meritocracy and excellence, doctoral systems often remain organised around implicit norms that privilege uninterrupted productivity, temporal flexibility, and disembodied academic subjectivities. This paper contributes to debates on the inclusiveness and future of the doctoral system by examining how gendered and classed inequalities are lived, negotiated and reproduced within doctoral trajectories. Background Drawing on feminist and sociological scholarship, the paper situates doctoral education within broader discussions on gender, class and academic identity formation. Concepts such as imagined futures, imposter syndrome, emotional labour, and care responsibilities are used to interrogate how doctoral systems continue to privilege particular life courses and academic subjectivities, while marginalising others (Ball, 2006; Walkerdine, 1989). Motherhood is approached not as an exceptional or individual circumstance, but as a critical analytical lens through which gendered and classed expectations of doctoral availability, productivity and belonging become visible (Ringrose, 2007; Goode, 2019). Methodology The paper adopts a feminist autoethnographic methodology, employing reflexive self-writing as both epistemological and analytical practice (Foucault, 1997). Autoethnography is used to connect lived doctoral experience with wider structural and institutional conditions, allowing personal narrative to function as data for theorising inequality within doctoral education. The analysis reflects on doctoral experiences shaped by working-class mobility, gendered academic cultures, supervision practices, imposter syndrome and the temporal and emotional pressures associated with doctoral motherhood. Expected Analytical Insights Rather than presenting empirical findings in the conventional sense, the paper offers analytically grounded reflections emerging from critical engagement with lived doctoral experience. The analysis reflects on how meritocratic doctoral cultures obscure unequal starting points and embodied constraints, producing doctoral subjectivities marked by misrecognition, exhaustion and precarious belonging (Ball, 2006; Walkerdine, 1989). Motherhood functions as a key site where the limits of linear, productivity-driven doctoral models are exposed, revealing how care, emotional labour and relational work remain systematically undervalued within doctoral education (Ringrose, 2007; Goode, 2019). Conclusion The paper argues for a re-envisioning of doctoral education that recognises diverse life histories, values emotional and care labour, and challenges narrow constructions of the “ideal” doctoral researcher, contributing to more inclusive doctoral systems and futures

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