Gender differences in higher education from a life course perspective : Transitions and social inequality between enrolment and first post-doc position
Autor/in:
Lörz, Markus; Mühleck, Kai
Quelle: High Educ (Higher Education), 77 (2019) 3, S 381–402
Inhalt: In the last decades, a vast number of post-industrialised economies have experienced a growing participation of women in higher education. However, men and women still differ with regard to their subsequent academic careers and labour market prospects. While several studies have disentangled the cumulative process of gender inequalities along the path to higher education, few studies cover two or more subsequent transitions in the academic career following graduation from upper-secondary education. We have investigated gender differences at five educational stages between graduation from upper-secondary education and the first post-doc position. To explain gender differences, we have integrated arguments of individual decision-making and educational, familial and work context conditions. This life course perspective leads us to propose several hypotheses on why the academic careers of men and women would differ in terms of transitions to the next education stage and graduation. We test our hypotheses using a longitudinal dataset which covers a large part of individual educational and academic careers of a cohort of students, beginning at the age of 20 years and extending up to the age of 40 years. Our results show that gender differences are more pronounced at the beginning of the academic career and tend to fade out at later stages. In particular, gender differences occur most strongly at transitions to the next educational stage rather than being caused by different graduation rates. These differences can be explained only to a very minor extent by performance. Separated analysis shows that men and women differ in their reasons to start or stop an academic career, with family circumstances in particular having different consequences.
Inhalt: Using the concept of stealth power and a critical realist perspective, this article identifies leadership practices that obscure the centralisation of power, drawing on data from interviews with 25 academic decision-makers in formal leadership positions in HERIs in Ireland, Italy and Turkey.
Its key contribution is the innovative operationalisation of stealth power and the inductive identification of four practices which obscure that centralised power, i.e. rhetorical collegiality, agendacontrol, in-group loyalty and (at a deeper level) the invisibility of gendered power. The purpose of the article is emancipatory: by creating an awareness of these leadership practices, it challenges their persistence.
Schlagwörter:agenda control; centralised power; Führungskultur; Higher Education Research Institutes; in-group loyalty; interviews; invisibility of gendered power; Leadership practices; Machtdynamiken; Machtgefälle; rhetorical collegiality; senior management; senior position holders; stealth power; Universität
CEWS Kategorie:Berufsbiographie und Karriere, Netzwerke und Organisationen, Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung
Eine Analyse der Personalentwicklung in der Anästhesiologie unter besonderer Berücksichtigung von Gender-Aspekten
Autor/in:
van den Bussche, H.; Scherer, M.; Zöllner, C.; Kubitz, J. C.
Quelle: Der Anaesthesist, 68 (2019) 6, S 353–360
Inhalt: Skills shortage of nursing staff and physicians is a "hot topic" in health politics. For the future recruitment of medical staff in anesthesiology, an analysis of the staff development during the last decades considering gender aspects seems to be important. Therefore, the authors conducted a comparative analysis of data from the "Statistisches Bundesamt" (Fachserie 12 Reihe 7.3.1 and Fachserie 12 Reihe 6.1.1.) from 1994 until 2015. The analysis compared the development of anesthesiological staff (physicians) with the overall development of medical staff (physicians) in respect of the number of residents, consultants and department chairs. There are two major differences between the development of medical staff in anesthesiology and the overall development of medical staff: (1) in anesthesiology there is a high percentage of consultants without management tasks, (2) though the percentage of female colleagues is increasing both in anesthesiology and overall, the percentage of female colleagues in management or chair positions is lower in anesthesiology compared to the other disciplines, altogether. Anesthesiology is a discipline in which both the number of tasks and personnel have risen over the last two decades. The comparatively huge increase in the number of residents and consultants without management tasks suggests that the number of tasks in daily routine has substantially increased for anesthesiologists. The comparatively low percentage of female colleagues in chair positions should give an impulse to improve the compatibility of family and working live both for clinical and scientific careers.
Family-friendly academic conferences : A missing link to fix the “leaky pipeline”?
Autor/in:
Bos, Angela L.; Sweet-Cushman, Jennie; Schneider, Monica C.
Quelle: Politics, Groups, and Identities, 7 (2019) 3, S 748–758
Inhalt: Traveling to academic conferences to present research and network is essential for scholars to achieve success in the academy. Scholars with family obligations face barriers to participating in conferences, partly because most regional and national conferences are not organized to be family-friendly. While balancing travel to academic conferences with family responsibilities is a challenge faced by all academics, this burden can be especially high for women. As such, improving the family-friendly features of conferences could be one way to patch the “leaky pipeline” of young female scholars leaving the academy, and facilitate the movement of female faculty through the ranks from Assistant to Associate to Full Professor. We identify these barriers to conference attendance and how they might contribute to the leaky pipeline and share innovations from family-friendly small conferences that minimize these burdens. We also review what the major political science association conferences are doing to be family-friendly, and offer details about further recommended changes. Finally, we highlight one exemplary institutional policy and examples from other disciplines. Our conclusion is that there are many simple and affordable ways to make political science conferences more family-friendly and that these changes are necessary to creating an inclusive discipline.
Schlagwörter:academy; conferences; Frauen in der Wissenschaft; Gender; Mutterschaft; parenting; political science discipline
CEWS Kategorie:Wissenschaft als Beruf, Vereinbarkeit Familie-Beruf
Attitudes to Sexism and Gender Equity at a Danish University
Autor/in:
Skewes, Lea; Skewes, Joshua C.; Ryan, Michelle K.
Quelle: KKF (Kvinder, Køn & Forskning), (2019) 1-2, S 71–85
Inhalt: We designed this study to measure the degree of backlash a specific Danish university would encounter in response to gender equity interventions. To capture this resistance we used two standardized questionnaires: the Modern Sexism Scale, which measures explicit denial of gender discrimination and resentment towards gender equity demands (such as gender interventions) and
the Support for Discriminatory Practices which measures peoples explicit preferences for hiring men over women. We also asked an open question about attitudes towards the university’s current gender policies. The questionnaire was sent to 15,493 employees. With one prompt 1,805 completed the entire questionnaire. We found that university employees scored above the midpoint on modern sexism, indicating that, on average, they held sexist attitudes. We further showed that modern sexism scores varied depending on beliefs about what was being done for gender equity in the organization, such that those who thought that enough or too much was being done had significantly higher sexism scores than those who thought that not enough was being done. Over all, our findings document explicit sexist attitudes within the target university and suggest that gender equity interventions are therefore likely to be met by great resistance from some.
Schlagwörter:Explicit attitudes; gender discrimination; gender equity; Geschlechterdiskriminierung; Geschlechtergerechtigkeit; modern sexism; sexist attitudes; support for disciminatory practices
Quelle: Journal of the European Economic Association, 17 (2019) 2, S 535–566
Inhalt: This paper provides new evidence on gender bias in teaching evaluations. We exploit a quasi-experimental dataset of 19,952 student evaluations of university faculty in a context where students are randomly allocated to female or male instructors. Despite the fact that neither students’ grades nor self-study hours are affected by the instructor’s gender, we find that women receive systematically lower teaching evaluations than their male colleagues. This bias is driven by male students’ evaluations, is larger for mathematical courses, and particularly pronounced for junior women. The gender bias in teaching evaluations we document may have direct as well as indirect effects on the career progression of women by affecting junior women’s confidence and through the reallocation of instructor resources away from research and toward teaching. (JEL: J16, J71, I23, J45)
Schlagwörter:Diskriminierung; gender bias; Lehrevaluation; Student; Studium
CEWS Kategorie:Studium und Studierende, Geschlechterverhältnis
Quelle: Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 34(23-24) (2019) , S 4765–4793
Inhalt: The practice of ethics in social science research is a reflexive process of self-review to define a profession’s collective responsibility in the face of changing norms and expectations. In recent years, we have seen transformative changes in how society thinks about supporting sexual assault survivors, and how the scientific community thinks about our obligations to society. Decades of research on trauma and its impact has raised awareness about the needs of victimized individuals, giving rise to the trauma-informed practice movement, which emphasizes that service providers must center survivors’ well-being in all interactions, decisions, and program practices. The field of sexual assault research helped give rise to this movement and provides empirical support for its guiding tenets, and in this article, we explore how to bring these ideas full circle to begin articulating trauma-informed principles for research. A trauma-informed perspective on research challenges scientists to go beyond the requirements of the Belmont Report (1979) and institutional review boards' (IRB) regulations to develop research procedures that fully support survivors’ choice, control, and empowerment. Such reflection on participants’ rights is particularly important given the open science movement sweeping academia, which calls on scientists to share their data publicly to promote transparency, replication, and new discoveries. Disseminating data could pose significant safety, privacy, and confidentiality risks for victims of sexual assault, so we need to evaluate what open science means within a trauma-informed framework. In this article, we examine three key stages of the research process—participant recruitment, data collection, and dissemination—and consider how trauma-informed principles could help, but also could complicate, research practices. We explore these tensions and offer potential solutions so that research on sexual trauma embodies trauma-informed practice.
Schlagwörter:ethical issues in surveys; Ethik; Gewalt; open access; sexuelle Gewalt; violence against women