Dr Victoria Williams
About
Biography
Vickie is a Research Fellow working on the Health and Social Care Delivery Research (HSDR) Project: NIHR161818 - Investigating the conditions in which women GPs thrive in General Practice: What works, for whom, how and in what circumstances? Led by Dr Ruth Abrams.
Vickie is particularly interested in embodiment, temporality and interventions that support women’s health and wellbeing at work. Her doctoral thesis explores the experience of working with endometriosis and the influence of menstrual policy. Her research has so far advised parliamentary debates on supporting endometriosis in the workplace as well as the Women and Work APPG on menstrual wellbeing, and formed the basis of her TEDx talk ‘End-o, not the end of a career’. Vickie also sits on the Menstruation Friendly Independent Panel of experts accrediting organisations who support menstrual health at work.
Areas of specialism
News
In the media
Publications
In June, the Medical Women’s Federation released their Manifesto for Women Doctors. Across seven key themes, the manifesto details concrete actions for individuals, organisations and the government to help retain women doctors (1). Written after the Spring 2025 conference, this document is a flare, a distress signal sent to draw attention to a group known to be at risk of higher rates of burnout, poorer wellbeing outcomes, the ‘glass ceiling’ effect at senior leadership levels and increased patient demand in certain areas (child and women’s health) (2). Never has this manifesto come at a more important time, as we await the release of the NHS Ten Year Plan.
Drawing on interview and diary data from twenty-one women in the UK, this paper focuses on how endometriosis, a long-term gynaecological condition, is lived and navigated alongside paid employment. It discusses the intersectional dynamics of gender, disability, race and ethnicity to explore how certain bodies are precarized across space and time by the rigid temporal organization of work. We advance existing discussions of precarity by showing how, in the absence of supportive interventions, the embodied precarity of a widely misunderstood and gendered condition with highly variable symptoms can paradoxically make precarious work more suitable because of its purported flexibility. But this creates a double bind of its own, given the well-documented insecurity and lack of clear employment rights which characterizes such work. Theoretically, we develop the concept of endo time as a non-normative temporality located within crip time to highlight its radical divergence from normative ableist and androcentric time and neoliberal labour logic for those working with endometriosis. Endo time advances feminist theorizing of precarity by shedding additional light on bodies at and not at work, those which can and cannot work regularly and consistently; long-term gendered health conditions; and the discursive representation of women’s bodies as leaky, unpredictable and fragile.