BackgroundWomen medical students experience tensions as they learn to become doctors. These tensions reflect the cultural world of medical school and clinical medicine, spaces that are highly gendered, racist and exclusionary. This study describes how women medical students are envisioning themselves as future doctors during their first 2 years of medical school while experiencing these tensions.MethodsUsing Figured Worlds theory, this qualitative study focused on four participants from a larger longitudinal study. Each participant was interviewed four times over a 2‐year period using narrative methodology and provided multiple written reflections during their first year of medical school. Analysis was performed using deductive methods reflecting Figured Worlds theory.ResultsParticipants offered storied experiences about how they understood their place in the figured world, ways they enacted agency and how they responded to contradictions they encountered in medical school as they learned to become doctors. These three findings reflect concepts of Figured Worlds theory: positionality and discourse, power and agency, and improvisation. These findings also illuminate ways women medical students are navigating gendered and hierarchical structures of medical school to reimagine their roles in medicine.ConclusionParticipants' stories illuminate that woman medical students' lived experiences shaped their decision to enter medical school and continue to shape how they navigate their educational experience. These interactions have implications for their future roles as physicians and how medical schools respond to cultures of teaching and learning that may not recognise these students' positionality and potential agency in medical school and clinical medicine.

This study examined lived experiences of foreign-born student affairs professionals (SAPs) in the United States and Canadian higher education. We sought to understand foreign-born SAPs’ impacts on higher education internationalization and what their professional experiences inferred about the level of international engagement in the field of student affairs. The findings from 35 completed interviews unveiled foreign-born SAPs’ enthusiasm and capacities in contributing to internationalization work, particularly in international student services and international and intercultural education for domestic students and peers. However, their rocky journeys to attain visas to enter and stay in the field of student affairs indicated their misplaced functionalities and signaled a missed opportunity for higher education institutions. It is recommended that higher education institutions recognize the importance of internationalizing the SAP and creating a welcoming and supportive environment to further their internationalization efforts.

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Women academics face unparalleled challenges such as underrepresentation and marginalization in Chinese higher education. A review of the literature revealed a tendency in the scholarly discussions that separates gender from the social and organizational processes, which is a missed opportunity to better understand how gender interacts with the broader social, cultural, and political contexts. Using three major organizational theory perspectives, this conceptual paper addresses the issue of academic gender disparity through analyzing organizational culture, organizational management, and the way higher education institutions interact with the external environments. Higher education institutions are gendered organizations that create, fortify, and reproduce gender inequalities. This essay will provide various methodological, epistemological, and ontological possibilities of interventions for transformative organizational change.