When resilience becomes a requirement: widening participation and the hidden demands of postgraduate training

“They’re incredibly resilient.” At first glance, the observation appears benign: affirming, warm, admiring. Yet such remarks also reveal the expectations medical education quietly places on those who enter it. They often follow accounts of trainees working additional hours to manage debt, commuting long distances, supporting family, or navigating a career without familial precedent or access to professional networks. Admiration for resilience does not end at graduation; it extends into postgraduate training, where endurance may be viewed as evidence of readiness for clinical responsibility and progression. In contemporary medical education, resilience is often positioned as a desirable attribute and coping resource, risking attention being drawn away from the structural conditions that produce that strain [1]. It is invoked as a quiet reassurance, framed as a marker of individual capability. Yet such praise is not neutral. In privileging the capacity to endure adversity, resilience is transformed from a description of how individuals respond to difficulty into a moral and professional expectation, and a tacit prerequisite for participation in medical education [2, 3].