Quelle: Am Sociol Rev (American Sociological Review), (2023)
Inhalt: How does higher education shape the Black-White earnings gap? It may help close the gap if Black youth benefit more from attending and completing college than do White youth. On the other hand, Black college-goers are less likely to complete college relative to White students, and this disparity in degree completion helps reproduce racial inequality. In this study, we use a novel causal decomposition and a debiased machine learning method to isolate, quantify, and explain the equalizing and stratifying roles of college. Analyzing data from the NLSY97, we find that a bachelor’s degree has a strong equalizing effect on earnings among men (albeit not among women); yet, at the population level, this equalizing effect is partly offset by unequal likelihoods of bachelor’s completion between Black and White students. Moreover, a bachelor’s degree narrows the male Black-White earnings gap not by reducing the influence of class background and pre-college academic ability, but by lessening the “unexplained” penalty of being Black in the labor market. To illuminate the policy implications of our findings, we estimate counterfactual earnings gaps under a series of stylized educational interventions. We find that interventions that both boost rates of college attendance and bachelor’s completion and close racial disparities in these transitions can substantially reduce the Black-White earnings gap.
Quelle: Policy Reviews in Higher Education, 7 (2023) 2, S 127–168
Inhalt: Higher education as a field of research and a broad topic for investigation continues to grow; however, several topics remain less explicated than those about core university activities (teaching and research). Specifically, the experience of university professional staff is a topic that attracts lesser attention but is important and relevant to higher education institutions’ current and future operations. A systematic review of 54 publications from the first two decades of the twenty-first century, across the Global South and Global North, was undertaken to advance knowledge about the changing roles and occupational identities of professional staff and the spaces of interaction with others in the university community. This review found changes in professional identity construction, a growing sense of agency in professional staff, increasing visibility in their contributions to university work and developing collaborations with academic staff. These findings are set in the context of critical engagement with the discourse of third space and other boundary zones of staff interaction and working together. Our review concludes with specific propositions for university practice, informed policymaking and future research.
Schlagwörter:academic staff; boundary work; collaboration; higher education; interaction; professional identity; systematic review; third space; university
Quelle: Nat Rev Mater (Nature Reviews Materials), (2023)
Inhalt: Higher education and research institutions are critical to the well-being and success of societies, meaning their financial support is strongly in the public interest. At the same time, value-for-money principles demand that such investment delivers. Unfortunately, these principles are currently violated by one of the biggest sources of public funding inefficiency: sexism.
Gender pay gaps in economics: A deeper look at institutional factors
Autor/in:
Kim, MinSub; Chen, Joyce J.; Weinberg, Bruce A.
Quelle: Agricultural Economics, 54 (2023) 4, S 471–486
Inhalt: Using rich data on graduate tenure‐track faculty, we explore the gender pay gap in academic departments of economics and agricultural/applied economics and the differences between them. We find that the gender pay gaps in economics and agricultural/applied economics are 8.3% and 4.1%, respectively, controlling for faculty rank, experience, and university affiliation. The gender pay gap increases with rank and varies across institutions. Productivity is an important determinant of wages but it explains little of the gender pay gap. While the lower unexplained gap in agricultural/applied economics is laudable, a greater share of women who are assistant and associate professors is part of the explanation. Given institutional differences, we explore the extent to which institutional factors—differences in the returns to observed characteristics, such as rank; unobserved characteristics; and institutional differences in pay levels—contribute to the gender pay gap. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
Inhalt: Women remain underrepresented among faculty in nearly all academic fields. Using a census of 245,270 tenure-track and tenured professors at United States-based PhD-granting departments, we show that women leave academia overall at higher rates than men at every career age, in large part because of strongly gendered attrition at lower-prestige institutions, in non-STEM fields, and among tenured faculty. A large-scale survey of the same faculty indicates that the reasons faculty leave are gendered, even for institutions, fields, and career ages in which retention rates are not. Women are more likely than men to feel pushed from their jobs and less likely to feel pulled toward better opportunities, and women leave or consider leaving because of workplace climate more often than work-life balance. These results quantify the systemic nature of gendered faculty retention; contextualize its relationship with career age, institutional prestige, and field; and highlight the importance of understanding the gendered reasons for attrition rather than focusing on rates alone.
Quelle: Studies in Higher Education, (2023) , S 1–12
Inhalt: The disproportion of women to men at the top tier in the academic hierarchy, concerns politicians, academic leaders, students, and other stakeholders. A popular explanation for the gender imbalance in elite positions is that potential female candidates lack ambition and therefore do not have sufficient drive to make it to the top. In this study, we explore the issue of professional ambition among a group of women academics working as tenured associate professors in Norway. With the backdrop of VIE (Valence-instrumentality-expectancy) theory, we focus on two key subjective, but nonetheless contextual judgments that are assumed to underlie the decision to aim for a promotional opportunity; (i) Do I want it and (ii) Can I make it? Three sources of qualitative data provide interesting insights into these considerations, and our findings point to focusing more specifically on the perceived costs that are assumed to derive from making this career choice. The women are ambitious in the sense that they desire the professional clout and impact that comes with this top role (so, yes, they want it). However, a number of conditions are perceived to be central to the actual realization of their ambitions, such as more time, resources and transparency when it comes to the qualification process. The findings may serve as important to designing more suitable career conditions for this target group in practice. Finally, we propose the application of a context-specific gender perspective to better understand women’s career ambitions in higher education institutions (HEI).
Schlagwörter:career; career ambition; full professor; gender perspective; qualitative research; resources; track choice; women; work environment
CEWS Kategorie:Berufsbiographie und Karriere, Wissenschaft als Beruf
Persistent pandemic: The unequal impact of COVID labor on early career academics
Autor/in:
Ballif, Edmée; Zinn, Isabelle
Quelle: Gend Work Organ (Gender, Work and Organization), (2023)
Inhalt: The COVID-19 pandemic has not only highlighted preexisting inequalities in academia but has also exacerbated them while giving rise to novel forms of disparities. Drawing upon our experiences as women, parents, and early career academics (ECAs) in Switzerland and enriched by feminist theory on reproductive labor and carework, we examine the unequal impacts of the pandemic. First, our analysis reveals how the pandemic disproportionately impacted ECAs, a group already in a position of precarity within academia. Second, we identify the broad range of tasks brought about by the pandemic as “COVID labor”. This essential labor—undervalued, invisible, and often unpaid—had a particularly negative impact on ECAs. Third, looking at various intersections of difference, we emphasize that the experience of COVID labor was far from uniform among ECAs with institutional responses disregarding its extent and unequal distribution. In conclusion, we underscore the importance of acknowledging the long-term consequences of COVID labor on ECAs, particularly those belonging to underrepresented groups. Neglecting these issues may lead to the loss of a wide range of talented scholars for reasons that are not related to the quality of their academic performance.
Schlagwörter:academia; Arbeit; care work; COVID-19; early career researcher; inequalities; intersectional; intersektional; labor; pandemie; precarity; Reproduktionsarbeit; Schweiz; Switzerland
CEWS Kategorie:Berufsbiographie und Karriere, Wissenschaft als Beruf, Geschlechterverhältnis
Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on publishing in astronomy in the initial two years
Autor/in:
Böhm, Vanessa; Liu, Jia
Quelle: Nature Astronomy, 7 (2023) 1, S 105–112
Inhalt: The COVID-19 pandemic and associated lockdowns changed working conditions for many researchers worldwide. While there exists initial evidence that these conditions have had a measurable impact on the field of astronomy, a comprehensive quantitative analysis is still outstanding. We study the effects of the pandemic on the astronomy community worldwide, with a special focus on early-career and underrepresented female scientists, using public records of publications. We find that the overall output of the field, measured by the yearly paper count, has increased. This is mainly driven by boosted individual productivity in most countries. However, a decreasing number of incoming new researchers is seen in most countries we studied, indicating higher barriers for new researchers to enter the field or complete their first project during COVID. The overall improvement in productivity is not equally shared by women. A smaller fraction of papers are written by female astronomers and fewer women are among incoming new researchers as compared to pre-pandemic trends, in 14 out of 25 countries we studied. Even though female astronomers became more productive during COVID, the level of improvement is smaller than for men. Pre-COVID, female astronomers in countries such as the Netherlands, Australia and Switzerland were equally as or even more productive than their male colleagues. During COVID, on average, no single country’s female astronomers were able to be equally productive as their male colleagues.
Wie gut konnten Forschende während der Corona-Pandemie arbeiten? Eine Studie im Journal “Nature Astronomy” hat dies untersucht. Sie beschäftigt sich mit der Produktivität der Astronomie, könnte aber auch Rückschlüsse auf einige andere Disziplinen geben. Insgesamt haben die Lockdowns und Einschränkungen 2020 und 2021 der Produktivität in der Astronomie offenbar nicht geschadet: Nicht nur stieg die Zahl der weltweiten Veröffentlichungen um 13 Prozent und setzte damit den Aufwärtstrend der vorherigen Jahre fort, auch die individuelle Produktivität der Forschenden wuchs. Dies spricht dafür, dass die flexiblen Arbeitsbedingungen sowie durch wegfallende Wege gewonnene Zeit der eigenen Forschung zugute kam (FAZ, Nature Astronomy). Eine gute Nachricht? Nicht nur.
Denn nicht für alle Forschenden galt dies gleichermaßen: Es waren fast ausschließlich männliche Wissenschaftler, die produktiver wurden, während der Erfolg von weiblichen Wissenschaftlerinnen stagnierte. Sie konnten sogar weniger Zeit als vorher in ihre Forschung investieren. Der Gleichstellung dürften die Pandemiejahre also geschadet haben.
Schlagwörter:COVID-19; gender gap; publication gap
CEWS Kategorie:Wissenschaft als Beruf, Geschlechterverhältnis