Imagine two doctoral students with similar intelligence, motivation, and ambition. One progresses steadily through their PhD. The other has a child during graduate school, experiences difficulties with supervision, falls behind, and eventually develops significant mental health problems.
Years later, early colleagues will likely remember one as “promising” and the other as “difficult in character.”
But what if those descriptions overlook the most important part of the story?
Psychologists have long recognised the fundamental attribution error: our tendency to explain people’s behaviours by their personality while underestimating the influence of their circumstances and environment. Most of us are quick to conclude that a student is disorganised, difficult, or lacking resilience, even when their behaviour may be an understandable response to an exceptionally challenging environment. Ironically, despite teaching this principle, academia is not immune to it.
Graduate students occupy an unusual position. They are expected to produce original, high-quality research while often lacking many of the employment protections available to academic staff. Depending on the institution and their funding arrangement, becoming a parent during a PhD can mean limited maternity leave, financial insecurity, interruptions to research, and crucially no access to buffering return-to-work support that’s provided to staff and no access to supporting initiatives to attend conferences or keep one’s research going during leave.
These challenges do not occur in isolation. A supportive supervisory relationship can buffer many difficulties. Conversely, when supervision itself becomes a source of stress, the cumulative burden can be further compounded — particularly, when supervisors strongly attribute difficulties to the individual student’s character and see them as failing, while being oblivious to the systemic barriers around them. And again, when careers later diverge, the explanation often centres on the individual rather than the system.
This is where another psychological concept becomes relevant: epistemic injustice, which refers to others seeing an individual as unbelievable in their own knowledge of their personal experience. It is often used to describe situations in which people’s knowledge or testimony is given less credibility than it deserves. Individuals who have experienced structural disadvantage, whether through race, gender, or parental status, frequently find themselves in precisely this position. When they describe how institutional conditions contributed to their struggles, their accounts may be dismissed as making excuses, lacking insight into how academia works, or externalising responsibility. In other words, those who face early disadvantage are not only disadvantaged by the system but they may also be disbelieved when they describe that disadvantage. This further compounds the label of “difficult” assigned by those who are oblivious to systemic influences.
Looking back on my own academic journey, it seems my mental health difficulties are often viewed as the beginning of my struggles rather than one, very severe, consequence of systemic inadequacy and supervisory difficulties. Once someone acquires a reputation as “struggling” or “difficult,” that label can become remarkably sticky. Subsequent events are interpreted through that lens, while the institutional conditions that preceded those struggles gradually disappear from view, if they were ever visible to senior academic staff and institutions in the first place.
The story becomes one of individual vulnerability rather than accumulated disadvantage. This matters because reputations influence opportunities. Supervisors, collaborators, hiring committees, and promotion panels all make judgments about people’s potential. If the effects of structural barriers are mistaken for enduring character traits, disadvantage becomes self-perpetuating. And on a very practical level, this label means one cannot rely on supervisors for reference letters or future collaborations and may no longer feel welcome in shared spaces.
The psychological irony is striking. Fundamental attribution error leads observers to underestimate the role of institutional circumstances. Epistemic injustice then makes it harder for those affected to correct the narrative. Together, they create a powerful mechanism through which structural inequality becomes personalised and hard to change.
None of this denies that individuals differ in resilience, coping, or mental health. Rather, it asks us to recognise that people do not develop in a vacuum. Behaviour, well-being, and career trajectories emerge from the interaction between individuals and the environments they inhabit.
Perhaps the better question is not “Why was or is this person so difficult?” but “What happened to them?” That shift in perspective does more than increase compassion. It produces more accurate explanations. And if we genuinely want academia, and other professions, to become more inclusive and diverse places, accuracy matters. Sometimes what appears to be an individual’s weakness is, in fact, the lingering imprint of an institution or sector’s blind spots.
