The probability of reaching a permanent academic position is strongly gendered in most if not all higher education systems. Though a widely studied phenomenon, few studies problematise the way national contexts both academic and non-academic that shape employment structures and national gender regimes are interpreted by individual academics, and frame their career strategies and the ways of subjectively coping with the norms of academic careers. Aiming to ll this research gap, this chapter compares the subjective representations of early career academics in terms of career expectation and articulation between professional and private sphere in two contrasted national contexts; Finland and Switzerland. Focusing especially on international mobility, the paper aims to reveal how national polities matter to understand young academics' strategies and how these strategies are shaped or not by gender relationships in the era of the so called internationalisation' of academic labour markets and the norm of the academic mobility