Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) is the most common endocrine syndrome that disproportionally affects women of childbearing age (~8% to 13% of women worldwide). If unmanaged, it can lead to chronic, lifelong complications. Over the past decade, improvements in diagnostic guidelines have not produced an expected reduction in the diagnostic timeframe. We examined the potential reasons underlying this diagnosis delay. Participants first constructed a diagnostic timeline and then charted and reflected on their diagnosis journeys. Through a reflexive thematic analysis, five themes represented the most common diagnostic trajectory: (a) dismissal of adolescents’ early symptoms, (b) negative diagnostic encounters, (c) wariness of treatment options, (d) uncertainty for the future, and (e) self-education and advocacy. Our findings lead us to argue for education of physicians and allied professionals to strengthen patient-centered care delivery to women with a focus on building in training supports that include critically informed, social justice foundations.

Purpose Burnout has been studied by organizational researchers for nearly 50 years (Maslach and Schaufeli, 2017; Schaufeli et al., 2009); however, little attention is given to burnout experienced by employed students who may be prone to the symptoms of burnout as they juggle multiple demanding roles. Burnout in employed students has previously been conceptualized as a bi-factor model consisting of three dimensions: general burnout, apathy and exhaustion (see Rauti et al., 2019 for further information). The purpose of this paper is to develop and validate a novel and theoretically driven tool to assess burnout in employed students. Design/methodology/approach A sample of 239 employed undergraduate students from a university in southwestern Ontario completed an online survey which included the University of Windsor Employed Student Burnout Survey. Participants also completed six additional measures for scale validation purposes. Findings Confirmatory factor analysis supported a four-factor model of the employed student burnout scale: apathy toward employment, exhaustion toward employment, apathy toward academics and exhaustion toward academics. The findings also supported a bi-factor version of the four-factor model. Correlation analyses provided evidence for convergent and divergent validity. Originality/value The experience of burnout for employed students is unique as employed students balance the demands of work and school simultaneously. This research suggests that experiences of burnout from work and burnout from school may be distinct from one another and that burnout is context specific.

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Polycystic ovary syndrome is the most common endocrine disorder among women aged from 18 to 40 years. Its debilitating menstrual/obesity-related symptoms challenge conceptions of femininity. To date, age-related differences in women’s body esteem and physicians’ symptom management recommendations have not been investigated. Age moderated the relationships between symptom concerns and both sexual attractiveness and physical condition, but only for midlife, not for emerging adult women. Midlife women received holistic management information from physicians, while emerging adult women received weight management information. This study highlights the need for physician training to manage women’s health and age-targeted body acceptance interventions for women diagnosed with polycystic ovary syndrome.

Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), which affects 8 to 13% of reproductive-aged women, is a highly gendered disorder whose symptoms disrupt Western conceptions of femininity. This may be especially debilitating for young women, who are targeted by societal discourses governing how they “should” be. We interviewed 10 young Canadian women, aged 18 to 22, about how PCOS has influenced and/or conflated their conceptions of identity and (ab)normality within the current socio-cultural context. Using reflexive thematic analysis through a critical feminist lens, we present three themes: justifying abnormality, pathologizing the abnormal, and fear of failure in pregnancy. Young women described feeling “weird” and “not normal” as a result of their symptoms and expressed worries about their ability to adhere to gendered expectations. We argue that the blanketing of these desirable states as “normal” has pervasive implications for women’s lives and leaves them feeling defective and/or inadequate, which was further reinforced by implicit, gender-based power dynamics in medical institutions when women sought care. We suggest the need for engagement with discomfort and leveraging PCOS as a unique entryway into an analysis of intersectional issues to capture complexities in lived experience.