Gender and academic careers in cross-national perspective : preliminary results from a WEU survey in Poland and Germany
Autor/in:
Majcher, Agnieszka
Quelle: Institut für Politikwissenschaft, FB 06 Erziehungswissenschaft und Sozialwissenschaften, Universität Münster; Münster (Training paper / Women in European Universities, Research and Training Network), 2004. 50 S.
Inhalt: "This paper presents preliminary findings from a WEU international survey of the academic men and women in Poland and Germany. In this paper we focus on selected aspects of academic careers linked to tensions that may arise from different and conflicting roles men and women play in professional and private spheres. We attempted to propose an explanatory framework that would allow us to explain cross-national differences between career patterns in both countries as well as the extend of gender differences within the countries. This explanatory framework is linked to different university cultures and organizational aspects academic careers as well as different contexts and histories of higher education feminization processes. In Germany they would be based on negative or discriminatory integration of women into German academia and in Poland the integration took through 'loyalty contract' with all positive and negative consequences (e.g. acceptance of patriarchal and paternalistic academic culture and resistance to the feminist discourse). We found that barriers and hindrances related to the problems with reconciliation between work and family do not play a major role in career outcomes of academic women neither in Poland nor in Germany but they still affect career strategies in Germany. Polish academia provides also much more room for reconciliation of work and family than German one and this seems to be even more crucial than availability or quality of childcare. Generally academic careers in Germany put more pressures on both men and women than in Poland. Moreover these pressures seem to have less to do with the workload but rather organization of academic careers." (author's abstract)