At the international level, Iceland is faring well on gender assessments concerning economic status, political position, education, and health. However, these rankings fail to assess what is happening within the private sphere regarding gender equality. We argue that research on the interplay between the domestic and public spheres is important because these overlapping fields affect the lives of women and men differently. By focusing on the earnings of doctorate holders in Iceland, we aim to obtain a better understanding of the gendered meaning and implications of found earnings inequalities. Relying on longitudinal population register data, as well as 32 in-depth interviews with doctorate holders, we find that the men earn significantly more than the women. While the quantitative model only explains a small part of the inequality, the qualitative findings indicate that decisions made within the household, referred to as team play, negotiation, and choices, play a defining role in post-doctorate career development. We conclude that, despite the male breadwinner model being outdated in Icelandic society, some of its pillar thoughts still persist beneath the surface, keeping gender inequality within the household in place.

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.