Precarity of post doctorate career breaks: does gender matter?
Autor/in:
Jones, Karen
Quelle: Studies in Higher Education, 48 (2023) 10, S 1576–1594
Inhalt: Against a background of Bologna process goals to improve employment prospects for PhD graduates, and the crisis of precarious employment conditions and prospects afflicting postdoctoral researchers – hitherto postdocs, the OECD ([2021], “Reducing the Precarity of Academic Research Careers.” In OECD Science, Technology and Industry Policy Papers. Paris: OECD Publishing,) called for research into postdoctoral careers and the precarity phenomenon. This paper responds by giving attention to career breaks as these represent a prevalent but under researched aspect of postdoc precarity in the contemporary academic labor market. Utilizing a substantial international mixed-method dataset with a sample of 950 postdocs, the study examined experiences and perceptions of the professional and personal implications of academic career breaks. Results reveal significant differences between males and females in key areas: maternity was the main reason for females’ career breaks, and redundancy/end of contract for males. Females resumed employment more with the same employer and males with a different employer. Support surrounding career breaks was mixed, largely inadequate, but not associated with gender. Perceptions of career breaks differed significantly across groups of postdocs that previously experienced a career break, those on a career break, and postdocs that had never had a career break. The latter two groups perceived negative career outcomes and positive personal outcomes more than postdocs who had previously had a career break, however, significant gender differences indicate females were more negative about the personal implications of career breaks. Discussion of the findings concludes that under neoliberalism postdocs represent a growing lumpen proletariat, leading to recommendations for policy, practice and further research into gender, precarity and postdoctoral careers.
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.
Bund-Länder-Programm zur Förderung des wissenschaftlichen Nachwuchses : Monitoring-Bericht 2023
Autor/in:
Gemeinsame Wissenschaftskonferenz (GWK)
Quelle: Bonn (Materialien der GWK, 87), 2023.
Inhalt: Bund und Länder haben 2016 das Programm zur Förderung des wissenschaftlichen Nachwuchses beschlossen, mit dem die Karrierewege des wissenschaftlichen Nachwuchses an Universitäten besser planbar gemacht und transparenter gestaltet werden sollen.
Ziel des mit einer Milliarde Euro über fünfzehn Jahre ausgestatteten Programms ist es außerdem, die internationale Attraktivität des deutschen Wissenschaftssystems zu steigern und den Universitäten dabei zu helfen, die besten Nachwuchswissenschaftlerinnen und Nachwuchswissenschaftler aus dem In- und Ausland zu gewinnen und möglichst dauerhaft zu halten.
Der Monitoringbericht beruht auf Daten zu den programmgeförderten Universitäten und Tenure-Track-Professuren, die der Projektträger des Bund-Länder-Programms zur Förderung des wissenschaftlichen Nachwuchses unter anderem aufgrund von Meldungen der Zuwendungsempfängerinnen erhoben hat (nachfolgend: „Daten zum programmbegleitenden Monitoring“). Berichtszeitraum ist in der Regel das Kalenderjahr. Für Angaben zu allen antragsberechtigten Universitäten wurde das Statistische Bundesamt mit Sonderauswertungen u. a. der Hochschulpersonalstatistik beauftragt. Stichtag für die Hochschulpersonalstatistik ist der 1. Dezember des jeweiligen Jahres. Die Zeitreihen beginnen im Jahr 2016 (Ausgangssituation vor Programmbeginn), 2017 (Jahr des Programmbeginns) oder 2018 (Jahr der ersten Besetzungen im Programm) und enden im Jahr 2021 (neueste verfügbare Daten der Hochschulpersonalstatistik), 2022 (neueste verfügbare statistische Daten der geförderten Universitäten) oder zum 1. Juli 2023. Im Anhang sind die rechtlichen Voraussetzungen, Rahmenbedingungen und Möglichkeiten für die Schaffung von Tenure-Track-Professuren in den Ländern (Anhang 1) sowie die rechtlichen Rahmenbedingungen für die Ausgestaltung der Verlängerungsjahre bei Geburt oder Adoption eines Kindes im Sinne des § 3 Nummer 1 der Verwaltungsvereinbarung in den Ländern (Anhang 2) dokumentiert.
Gender and underrepresented minorities differences in research funding
Autor/in:
Cruz-Castro, Laura; K. Ginther, Donna; Sanz-Menéndez, Luis
Quelle: Handbook of Public Funding of Research. Benedetto Lepori (Hrsg.), Ben Jongbloed (Hrsg.), Diana Hicks (Hrsg.), Edward Elgar Publishing. 2023, S 279–300
Inhalt: This review is about the relationship between research funding allocation, gender and underrepresented minorities (URM). Research on gender and URM disparities in research funding is relevant as it speaks directly to the unexplained gaps in career advancement by illuminating potential effects of gender, race and ethnicity characteristics on productivity, reputation and compensation, offering potential explanations for the distribution of other types of organizational resources and career opportunities. The allocation of research funding is generally performed by the funding bodies, and it has been traditionally expected to operate under some values and principles shared by the science community such as merit-based allocations and equity and not be based on any ascriptive feature of the individuals, like gender, race or ethnicity. Additionally, social and policy pressures for the adoption of other social values exist, such as gender and race equality, or more generally, the observation of non-discriminatory practices. Despite the abundant literature on gender inequality in academia (see Ceci et al. 2014 for a review) and much less regarding URM (National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics 2021; Bernard and Cooperdock 2018), research remains largely inconclusive as to whether disparities are mainly the result of structural differences, self-selection or the effect of different types or discrimination or bias during the review and allocation processes. We will argue that there are analytical gaps as well as methodological challenges that should be addressed in order to increase the robustness of research on this topic.
The scope of this review refers to the recent situation of research funding in various countries and agencies with a focus on gender and URM disparities. It also tries to assess the changing trends. We consider research funding allocation as a process and at each phase there are factors that lead to disparities in funding outcomes across groups. Adopting this type of dynamic perspective means that cumulative effects play a relevant role. We focus on grant funding and not on baseline funding allocated through, for instance, hiring. We do not cover issues related to how research funding supports careers since this is addressed in Melkers, Woolley and Kreth (Chapter 18 in this Handbook). Furthermore, given the complexity and specificity of research funding allocation practices across agencies and countries, their variations and their context dependent effects, we do not discuss funding agency policies designed to provide a more equitable allocation of funding.
Schlagwörter:Ethnicity; Gender; gender differences; minority; Minority Group; race; research funding
CEWS Kategorie:Diversity, Wissenschaft als Beruf, Geschlechterverhältnis
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