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Parenthood premium but fatherhood super-premium in academic productivity? A matter of partner's employment
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This article examines the relationship between female breadwinning and life satisfaction in heterosexual couples. We extend previous research by treating the man's employment status as a variable that helps to explain rather than confounds this relationship, and by comparing multiple countries through regression analyses of European Social Survey data (Rounds 2-9). Results provide evidence of a female-breadwinner well-being 'penalty': men and women are less satisfied with their lives under the female-breadwinner arrangement versus the dual-earner and male-breadwinner alternatives. The penalty is marginal when the male partner is part-time employed but sizeable when he is jobless. However, there are gender differences: after controls for composition, gender-role attitudes, and partners' relative incomes, the penalty becomes negligible for women while remaining large for men. Analyses suggest these gender differences are linked to high male unemployment among female-breadwinner couples: whereas women appear roughly equally adversely affected by a male partner's unemployment as by their own, men report substantially higher well-being when she is unemployed instead of him. Country comparisons indicate that while this female-breadwinner well-being penalty is largest in more conservative contexts, especially Germany, it is fairly universal across Europe. So, even in countries where women's employment is more widespread and cultural and institutional support for the male-breadwinner model is weaker, unemployed men with breadwinner wives are not immune from the social stigma and psychological difficulties associated with their gender non-conformity.
Carers in academia is a young but growing field, which has quickly expanded since the 2000s and has gained new momentum during the Covid‐19 pandemic and the accompanying disruptions of personal and professional lives. It is also one which, through its associations with reproductive and women's work, remains relatively marginalised. This article examines the English language research literature on carers in academia. Drawing upon feminist poststructuralist theories, we contend that, because the literature is not ‘out of the discourses’ of care and academic work and, instead, contributes to construct the objects it speaks of, the state of the field is a matter of cognitive and social justice. Following the presentation of the methodological and theoretical frameworks and a discussion of the authorial voices framing the field, we consider the relative in/visibilities of various groups of care/rs. Drawing on a review which identified 158 relevant texts, we find research in the field broadly ignores male, disabled, BME and LGBTQ+ carers, as well as ancillary workers and professional groups other than academics, and forms of care work other than parenting healthy, abled children. We then move to discussing the liminalities of care, noting the absence of studies of care work in academia related to non‐humans and to end of life. We conclude by pointing out the need for further reflexivity in terms of how processes of knowledge production include and exclude in ways that are complex and fluid.
Gender differences in research productivity have been well documented. One frequent explanation of these differences is disproportionate child-related responsibilities for women. However, changing social dynamics around parenting has led to fathers taking an increasingly active role in parenting. This demands a more nuanced approach to understanding the relationship between parenting and productivity for both men and women. To gain insight into associations between parent roles, partner type, research productivity, and research impact, we conducted a global survey that targeted 1.5 million active scientists; we received viable responses from 10,445 parents (< 1% response rate), thus providing a basis for exploratory analyses that shed light on associations between parenting models and research outcomes, across men and women. Results suggest that the gendered effect observed in production may be related by differential engagement in parenting: men who serve in lead roles suffer similar penalties for parenting engagement, but women are more likely to serve in lead roles and to be more engaged across time and tasks, therefore suffering a higher penalty. Taking a period of parental leave is associated with higher levels of productivity; however, the productivity advantage dissipates after six months for the US-sample, and at 12-months for the non-US sample. These results suggest that parental engagement is a more powerful variable to explain gender differences in academic productivity than the mere existence of children, and that policies should factor these labor differentials into account.
While inequalities in science are common, most efforts to understand them treat scientists as isolated individuals, ignoring the network effects of collaboration. Here, we develop models that untangle the network effects of productivity defined as paper counts, and prominence referring to high-impact publications, of individual scientists from their collaboration networks. We find that gendered differences in the productivity and prominence of mid-career researchers can be largely explained by differences in their coauthorship networks. Hence, collaboration networks act as a form of social capital, and we find evidence of their transferability from senior to junior collaborators, with benefits that decay as researchers age. Collaboration network effects can also explain a large proportion of the productivity and prominence advantages held by researchers at prestigious institutions. These results highlight a substantial role of social networks in driving inequalities in science, and suggest that collaboration networks represent an important form of unequally distributed social capital that shapes who makes what scientific discoveries. While inequalities in science are common, most efforts to understand them treat scientists as isolated individuals, ignoring the network effects of collaboration. Here, the authors develop models that untangle the network effects of productivity and prominence of individual scientists from their collaboration networks.
Being a parent has long been associated with gender disparities in academia. However, details of the mechanisms by which parenthood and gender influence academic career achievement and progression are not fully understood. Here, using data from a survey of 7,764 academics in North America and publication data from the Web of Science, we analyze gender differences in parenthood and academic achievements and explore the influence of work-family conflict and partner support on these gender gaps. Our results suggest that gender gaps in academic achievement are, in fact, 'parenthood gender gaps'. Specifically, we found significant gender gaps in all measures of academic achievement (both objective and subjective) in the parent group but not in the non-parent group. Mothers are more likely than fathers to experience higher levels of work-family conflict and to receive lower levels of partner support, contributing significantly to the gender gaps in academic achievement for the parent group. We also discuss possible interventions and actions for reducing gender gaps in academia.
This aim of this open access book is to launch an international, cross-disciplinary conversation on fatherhood engagement. By integrating perspective from three sectors—Health, Social Policy, and Work in Organizations—the book offers a novel perspective on the benefits of engaged fatherhood for men, for families, and for gender equality. The chapters are crafted to engaged broad audiences, including policy makers and organizational leaders, healthcare practitioners and fellow scholars, as well as families and their loved ones.
An academic’s life is acknowledged to be one with constant pressure to publish, as well as fulfilling teaching and other tasks. Much has been written about the academic mother’s experience, where professional gain is often reported to be at personal expense. Academic fathers’ experiences are less explored, and usually situated within their own home countries. This article presents qualitative narrative research of male faculty parents working in the United Arab Emirates in the Arabian Gulf. The ways in which the academic fathers ‘perform’ fatherhood, strive to find balance in their lives and create space for the necessary work of academic research, are explored. The findings indicate that where work pressures are experienced, their home support systems (namely spousal support, but also paid domestic help) compensated for this in a way which does not appear to incur self-sacrifice or career impact. The academic fathers generally reported feeling supported and validated by their organizations and host country.
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Across academia, men and women tend to publish at unequal rates. Existing explanations include the potentially unequal impact of parenthood on scholarship, but a lack of appropriate data has prevented its clear assessment. Here, we quantify the impact of parenthood on scholarship using an extensive survey of the timing of parenthood events, longitudinal publication data, and perceptions of research expectations among 3064 tenure-track faculty at 450 Ph.D.-granting computer science, history, and business departments across the United States and Canada, along with data on institution-specific parental leave policies. Parenthood explains most of the gender productivity gap by lowering the average short-term productivity of mothers, even as parents tend to be slightly more productive on average than nonparents. However, the size of productivity penalty for mothers appears to have shrunk over time. Women report that paid parental leave and adequate childcare are important factors in their recruitment and retention. These results have broad implications for efforts to improve the inclusiveness of scholarship.
The global COVID-19 pandemic is affecting people’s work-life balance across the world. For academics, confinement policies enacted by most countries have implied a sudden switch to home-work, a transition to online teaching and mentoring, and an adjustment of research activities. In this article we discuss how the COVID-19 crisis is affecting our profession and how it may change it in the future. We argue that academia must foster a culture of care, help us refocus on what is most important, and redefine excellence in teaching and research. Such re-orientation can make academic practice more respectful and sustainable, now during confinement but also once the pandemic has passed. We conclude providing practical suggestions on how to renew our practice, which inevitably entails re-assessing the social-psychological, political, and environmental implications of academic activities and our value systems.
Significance
Empirical evidence suggests significant gender differences in the total productivity and impact of academic careers across science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. Paradoxically, the increase in the number of women academics over the past 60 years has increased these gender differences. Yet, we find that men and women publish a comparable number of papers per year and have equivalent career-wise impact for the same total number of publications. This suggests the productivity and impact of gender differences are explained by different publishing career lengths and dropout rates. This comprehensive picture of gender inequality in academic publishing can help rephrase the conversation around the sustainability of women’s careers in academia, with important consequences for institutions and policy makers.
This study aimed to explore the allocation of family work among male carer/female breadwinner couples in comparison to traditional couples, in an attempt to identify the most change-resistant aspects of gendered family roles. A sample of 236 parents with children from birth to 5 years old completed extensive questionnaires about their daily routines and allocation of tasks. As hypothesised, primary caregiving fathers and mothers performed a similar share of housework and physical childcare tasks and were more involved in these forms of family work than breadwinning fathers and mothers. Also as hypothesised, primary caregiving mothers assumed a greater share of the emotional care and overall responsibility for childcare than primary caregiving fathers. That is, whereas primary caregiving mothers carried out most of the emotional care and responsibility for childcare with very little involvement of the breadwinning fathers, among role-reversed couples emotional care and responsibility were shared more equally. These findings suggest that overall, role-reversed couples ‘undo’ gender by performing tasks according to their family role rather than prescriptive gender norms. The results further support the distinction between the more malleable forms of family work and the most change-resistant aspects of gendered parenting.
This article explores the barriers and strategies experienced by Spanish working fathers regarding work-family balance. Based on 29 in-depth interviews with Spanish working fathers in different types of organizations and sectors, the results of this study present different barriers that are divided into three groups: contextual barriers, organizational barriers and internalized barriers. The results also suggest that the study’s participants fall into three categories or patterns: hegemonic gender order conformers, borderers and deviants, who use three different strategies (no strategies, invisible strategies and visible strategies) to overcome the barriers detected in this research. The dynamics of reinforcing, being complicit and challenging hegemonic masculinities within the workplace are discussed in light of recent theories regarding gender and organizations, masculinities and fatherhood.
In analysing heterosexual couples’ work–family arrangements over time and space, the comparative social policy literature has settled on the framework of the ‘male-breadwinner’ versus the ‘dual-earner’ family. Yet, in assuming men in couple-families are (full-time) employed, this framework overlooks another work–family arrangement, which is the ‘female-breadwinner’ couple. Including female-breadwinner couples matters because of their growing prevalence and, as our analysis shows, greater economic vulnerability. We perform descriptive and regression analyses of Luxembourg Income Study microdata to compare household incomes for female-breadwinner couples and other couple-types across 20 industrialized countries. We then consider how labour earnings and benefit incomes vary for ‘pure’ breadwinner couples – comprising one wage-earner and one inactive/unemployed partner – according to the gender of the breadwinner. We find that pure female breadwinners have lower average individual earnings than male breadwinners, even after controlling for sociodemographic characteristics and occupational and working-time differences. Furthermore, welfare systems across most countries are not working hard enough to compensate for the female breadwinner earnings penalty, including in social-democratic countries. Once controls are included in our regression models, it never happens that pure female breadwinners have higher disposable household incomes than pure male breadwinners. Thus, our study adds to a growing body of evidence showing that female-breadwinner families sit at the intersection of multiple disadvantages. In turn, these couples offer comparative scholars of the welfare state an ‘acid test’ case study for how effectively families are protected from social risk. Our results additionally highlight how cross-national differences in the female breadwinner income disadvantage do not fit neatly with established welfare typologies, suggesting that other factors – in particular, labour market characteristics and the economic cycle – are also at play.
Do lifestyle preferences contribute to the remaining gender gap in higher positions in academia with highly qualified women—especially those with children—deliberately working fewer hours than men do? We tested the “mothers work less” hypothesis in two samples of early career researchers employed at universities in Germany (N = 202) and in the US (N = 197). Early career researchers in the US worked on average 6.3 hours more per week than researchers in Germany. In Germany, female early career researchers with children had drastically reduced work hours (around 8 hours per week) compared to male researchers with children and compared to female researchers without children, whereas we found no such effect for U.S. researchers. In addition, we asked how long respondents would ideally want to work (ideal work hours), and results revealed similar effects for ideal work hours. Results support the “mothers work less” hypothesis for German but not for U.S. early career researchers.
We look into the question whether heterogeneity stemming from research orientation, gender, or disciplinary and cultural differences with their PhD supervisors helps or hampers academics’ careers. Based on a sample of 248 academics at two leading European universities of technology, we combine multinomial logit models and sequential logit models to understand career advancement. Our results show that heterogeneity stemming from research orientation is helpful. Academics who bridge between the quest for fundamental understanding and socio-economic relevance attain career success. Yet heterogeneity stemming from gender hinders careers: female academics face problems securing tenured positions and full professorships. Mentor–mentee heterogeneity only helps in early career transitions, but hampers advancement later on. Our insights offer suggestions to policymakers, university managers, and academics, because they help to identify promising academics, the right support for sitting staff members, measures correcting for gender imbalances, and can inform strategic choices regarding research orientation and PhD supervisors.
Background Gendered trends in housework provide an important insight into changing gender inequality. In particular, they shed light on the debate over the stalling of the 'gender revolution'. Additionally, the gender division of housework is significantly related to couple well-being; disagreements over housework are among the major sources of marital conflict. Objective The objective is to bring the evidence on gendered trends in time spent on core housework up to date, and to investigate cross-national variation in those trends. Methods Using 66 time use surveys from 19 countries, we apply a random-intercept, random-slope model to investigate half a century of change in gender differences in housework (1961-2011). Results There is a general movement in the direction of greater gender equality, but with significant country differences in both the level and the pace of convergence. Specifically, there was a slowing of gender convergence from the late 1980s in those countries where men and women's time in housework was already more equal, with steeper gender convergence continuing in those countries where the gender division of housework was less equal. Conclusions Our findings support the view that despite short-term stalls, slow-downs, and even reverses, as well as important differences in national policy contexts, the overall cross-national picture shows a continuing trend towards greater gender equality in the performance of housework.
Background: Female-breadwinner families represent a relatively new phenomenon in Europe. Little is known about the determinants of this couple type, which sensibly diverts from the traditional economic superiority of men within the household.
Objective: This paper studies the contextual correlates of partners’ contribution to the household income, distinguishing between female-breadwinner, male-breadwinner, and equal-income couples. In particular, it focuses on the role of male unemployment rate and the prevalence of gender-egalitarian attitudes as possible explanations for the emergence of female-breadwinner and equal-income couples across European regions and countries.
Methods: Using data from the fifth round (2010/2011) of the European Social Survey, integrated with data from the Eurostat database, we model the categorical variable identifying the couple type (male-breadwinner, female-breadwinner, or equal-income couple) by using a multilevel multinomial logistic regression model where individuals are nested within regions and countries.
Results: The prevalence of female-breadwinner, male-breadwinner, and equal-income couples varies considerably across European countries as well as within countries. The prevalence of female-breadwinner couples is positively associated with male unemployment, while it is not influenced by the diffusion of gender-egalitarian attitudes. However, the diffusion of gender-egalitarian attitudes matters for explaining the variation in the prevalence of equal-income couples across Europe.
Contribution: We add to the literature on partners’ contributions to household income by analysing the spatial distribution and the contextual correlates of female-breadwinner, male-breadwinner, and equal-income couples across European countries and regions.<br/
The problem of selection bias in economic and social statistics arises when a rule other than simple random sampling is used to sample the underlying population that is the object of interest. The distorted representation of a true population as a consequence of a sampling rule is the essence of the selection problem. Distorting selection rules may be the outcome of decisions of sample survey statisticians, self-selection decisions by the agents being studied, or both.
Both research and policy on balancing work and family life have tended to focus on mothers' lives. There has been a general lack of comparative research to the complex intersection between old and new forms of masculinity; and between fatherhood, work-life balance, gender relations and children's well-being. As a result, men's fathering roles and their struggle with work-life balance have often been neglected. These cultural challenges should be better theorized within family and social policy research. This volume examines how fathers fulfill their roles both within the family and at work and what institutional support could be of most benefit to them in combining these roles.
http://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9781137595270
Gender socialization is examined through a social psychological lens by applying identity theory and identity control theory. Current research from the fields of family and sociological social psychology are surveyed to provide a better conception of how the family operates as agents of socialization, and how identities that are cultivated and fostered in youth provide meaning throughout the life course and maintain the social order. The application of identity theory shows how gender is a diffuse status characteristic, which is salient in person, role, and social (group) identities, and also across social situations. Identity control theory is applied to show how emotions operate within an internal control system to stabilize gendered identities and perpetuate the social structure. Both theories are specifically applied to understand socialization dynamics that exist for children and families.
Academic Motherhood tells the story of over one hundred women who are both professors and mothers and examines how they navigated their professional lives at different career stages. Kelly Ward and Lisa Wolf-Wendel base their findings on a longitudinal study that asks how women faculty on the tenure track manage work and family in their early careers (pre-tenure) when their children are young (under the age of five), and then again in mid-career (post-tenure) when their children are older. The women studied work in a range of institutional settings-research universities, comprehensive universities, liberal arts colleges, and community colleges-and in a variety of disciplines, including the sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences. Much of the existing literature on balancing work and family presents a pessimistic view and offers cautionary tales of what to avoid and how to avoid it. In contrast, the goal of Academic Motherhood is to help tenure track faculty and the institutions at which they are employed "make it work." Writing for administrators, prospective and current faculty as well as scholars, Ward and Wolf-Wendel bring an element of hope and optimism to the topic of work and family in academe. They provide insight and policy recommendations that support faculty with children and offer mechanisms for problem-solving at personal, departmental, institutional, and national levels. © 2012 by Kelly Ward and Lisa Wolf-Wendel. All rights reserved.
In this book, Hakim presents a new, multi-disciplinary theory for explaining and predicting current and future patterns of women’s choice between employment and family work. Preference theory is the first theory developed specifically to explain women’s behaviour and choices. As such, it constitutes a major break from male-centred theorizing to date in sociology and economics. Preference theory is grounded on the substantial body of new research on women’s work and fertility that has flourished within feminist scholarship. It identifies five major historical changes that collectively are producing a qualitatively new scenario for women in prosperous societies in the 21st century. Throughout the analysis, the USA and Britain illustrate what the new scenario means for women, how it alters their preferences and work-lifestyles choices. Hakim also reviews research evidence on contemporary developments across Europe, Canada, Australia, Japan, and the far East to develop a new theory that is genuine international in perspective.
This is the first systematic international comparative study of the transformation of couples careers in modern societies. The countries included are Germany, the Netherlands, the Flemish part of Belgium, Italy, Spain, Great Britain, the United States, Sweden, Denmark, Poland, Hungary, and China. Using longitudinal data, this book explores what has and what has not changed for couples in various countries due to women’s greater involvement in paid employment. It provides evidence that despite substantial improvement in women’s educational attainment and career opportunities in all the countries studied, dimensions of role specialization in dual-earner couples have not undergone transformation to the same extent. Gender role change within the family has generally been asymmetric, so that housework and childcare primarily remain ‘women's work’. There are, however, also significant institutional differences among modern societies which determine a country’s timing, speed, and pattern of change from the traditional male breadwinner to the dual-earner family model. In particular, the impact of males ‘resources on their female partners’ employment careers is dependent on the welfare state regime. In conservative and Mediterranean welfare state regimes, women’s paid employment is negatively correlated with the occupational position of their husbands. In liberal welfare state regimes, no impact of husbands ‘resources on their wives’ labour force participation could be detected. In the social democratic welfare state regime and generally in (former) socialist countries, husbands ‘resources have a positive effect on their wives’ employment so that occupational resources cumulate in dual-earner families.
The outbreak of the COVID‐19 pandemic has made explicit the burden of care shouldered by academic mothers, in addition to juggling their scholarly commitments. Although discussions are abundant on the impact of caring responsibilities on the careers of women academics, neoliberal academia continues to minimize such struggles. Despite the disruptions to family routines caused by the health crisis, academic institutions have expected academic mothers and fathers to continue undertaking their professional responsibilities at the same level as before, disregarding their parenting demands. This paper contributes to the research on parenthood in academia by looking at how, throughout the pandemic, academic parents have negotiated the tensions between parenthood and academic demands, and by investigating the strategies they use to confront neoliberal culture of academic performativity, even amid the health crisis. The paper engages with the “space invaders” concept used by Puwar (2004) to analyze the “hypervisibility” of academic mothers' and fathers' “bodies out of place” during the pandemic, and to investigate their “renegade acts” against the uncaring attitudes of their institutions. Evidence is drawn from a qualitative study conducted during December 2020 and January 2021 among scholars affiliated to Portuguese academic institutions: 17 in‐depth interviews conducted with women, and two mixed‐gender focus groups. Our results research reveal how the experiences of academic mothers and fathers were not uniform during the pandemic. In addition, it shows how, despite their commitment to their academic responsibilities, these parents have crafted various resistance strategies to confront the institutional pressure to continue maintain their working routines, and instead positioning themselves as “more than just academics.”
One of the main drivers of gender inequality is the unequal distribution of paid work between men and women, in particular, after the birth of a child. In this study, we examine how a man’s employment flexibility, specifically his weekly hours of employment and schedule autonomy, influence his female partner’s return to employment after the birth of a first child using the German Socio-Economic Panel. Given women’s placement as primary but not solitary carers of young children, it is plausible that women’s attachment to the labour force will increase if their male partner is in a position to take on more of the responsibility for unpaid work. Results indicate that a father’s employment flexibility facilities a mother’s part-time employment. A return to full-time hours, however, is less contingent on the father’s employment circumstances or other external factors. The findings highlight the importance of employing couple-level analyses in examinations of the gender division of labour.
Despite increased awareness of the lack of gender equity in academia and a growing number of initiatives to address issues of diversity, change is slow, and inequalities remain. A major source of inequity is gender bias, which has a substantial negative impact on the careers, work-life balance, and mental health of underrepresented groups in science. Here, we argue that gender bias is not a single problem but manifests as a collection of distinct issues that impact researchers’ lives. We disentangle these facets and propose concrete solutions that can be adopted by individuals, academic institutions, and society.
As the COVID‐19 pandemic unfolds, a growing body of international literature is analysing the effects of the pandemic on academic labour and, specifically, on gender inequalities in academia. In that literature, much attention has been devoted to comparing the unequal impacts of COVID‐19 on the research activities of women and men, with studies demonstrating that women's research productivity has been disproportionately disrupted, in ways that are likely to have detrimental effects in the short‐ and long‐term. In this paper, I discuss that emerging literature on gender inequalities in pandemic academic productivity. I reflect on the questions asked, the issues centred and the assumptions made within this literature, devoting particular attention to how authors conceptualise academic labour and productivity, on the one hand, and gender, on the other. I show that this literature makes major contributions to exposing old and new gender inequalities in academia, but argue that it also risks reproducing some problematic assumptions about gender and about academic work. Discussing those assumptions and their effects, I identify some important questions for us to consider as we expand this literature and deepen our understanding of the complex gendered effects of COVID‐19 on academic labour.
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The Golden Age of post‐war capitalism has been eclipsed, and with it seemingly also the possibility of harmonizing equality and welfare with efficiency and jobs. Most analyses believe that the emerging post‐industrial society is overdetermined by massive, convergent forces, such as tertiarization, new technologies, or globalization, all conspiring to make welfare states unsustainable in the future. This book takes a second, more sociological and institutional look at the driving forces of economic transformation. What stands out as a result is that there is post‐industrial diversity rather than convergence. Macroscopic, global trends are undoubtedly powerful, yet their influence is easily rivalled by domestic institutional traditions, by the kind of welfare regime that, some generations ago, was put in place. It is, however, especially the family economy that holds the key as to what kind of post‐industrial model will emerge, and to how evolving trade‐offs will be managed. Twentieth‐century economic analysis depended on a set of sociological assumptions that now are invalid. Hence, to grasp better what drives today's economy, it is necessary to begin with its social foundations. After an Introduction, the book is arranged in three parts: I, Varieties of Welfare Capitalism (four chapters); II, The New Political Economy (two chapters); and III, Welfare Capitalism Recast? (two chapters).
Models of population-wide cultural change tend to invoke one of two broad models of individual change. One approach theorizes people actively updating their beliefs and behaviors in the face of new information. The other argues that, following early socialization experiences, dispositions are stable. We formalize these two models, elaborate empirical implications of each, and derive a simple combined model for comparing them using panel data. We test this model on 183 attitude and behavior items from the 2006 to 2014 rotating panels of the General Social Survey. The pattern of results is complex but more consistent with the settled dispositions model than with the active updating model. Most of the observed change in the GSS appears to be short-term attitude change or measurement error rather than persisting changes. When persistent change occurs, it is somewhat more likely to occur in younger people and for public behaviors and beliefs about high-profile issues than for private attitudes. We argue that we need both models in our theory of cultural evolution but that we need more research on the circumstances under which each is more likely to apply.
Much of what has hitherto been written about women’s lived experiences of the coronavirus pandemic takes their status as mothers and the spouses of men for granted. Skewed care demands on women researchers working from home may translate into individual career disadvantage and cumulative, large‐scale gender inequalities in the future, which is undeniably a serious issue. However, the narrative that single, childfree women must currently, by contrast, be unconcernedly enjoying a surge of productivity needs to be nuanced. Therefore, with this paper, I autoethnographically discuss how living alone in the context of the Covid‐19 pandemic provides its own set of circumstances and is hardly problem‐free, which affects how one can deal with issues of academic productivity and work‐life balance. Also, I take issue with the premise that our productivity is the golden standard against which we and our worth should be measured while we are living through a global crisis.
Modernization theorists’ ‘rising tide hypothesis’ predicted the continuous spread of egalitarian gender ideologies across the globe. We revisit this assumption by studying reunified Germany, a country that did not follow a strict modernization pathway. The socialist German Democratic Republic (GDR) actively fostered female employment and systematically promoted egalitarian ideologies before reunification with West Germany and the resulting incorporation into a conservative welfare state and market economy. Based on nationally representative, pooled cross-sectional data from the German General Social Survey (ALLBUS) from 1991 to 2016, we apply variance function regression to examine the impact of German reunification—akin to a natural experiment—on the average levels and dispersion of gender ideology. The results show: (i) East German cohorts socialized after reunification hold less egalitarian ideologies than cohorts socialized in the GDR, disrupting the rising tide. (ii) East German cohorts hold more egalitarian ideologies than West German cohorts, but the East-West gap is less pronounced for post-reunification cohorts. (iii) Cohorts in East Germany show higher conformity with gender ideology than their counterparts in West Germany; yet conformity did not change after reunification. (iv) Younger cohorts in West Germany show higher conformity with gender ideology than older cohorts.
Empirical studies show that though there is more room for improvement, much progress has been made toward gender equality since the second wave of feminism. Evidence also suggests that women’s advancements have been more dramatic in the public sphere of work and politics than in the private sphere of family life. We argue that this lopsided gender progress may be traced to uneven changes in gender attitudes. Using data from more than 27,000 respondents who participated in the General Social Survey from 1977 through 2016, we show that gender attitudes have more than one underlying dimension and that these dimensions have changed at different rates over time. Using latent class analysis, we find that the distribution of respondents’ attitudes toward gender equality has changed over the past 40 years. There has been an increase in the number of egalitarians who support equality in public and private spheres, while the traditionals who historically opposed equality in both domains have been replaced by ambivalents who feel differently about gender equality in the public and private spheres. Meanwhile, successive birth cohorts are becoming more egalitarian, with Generation-Xers and Millennials being the most likely to hold strong egalitarian views. The feminist revolution has succeeded in promoting egalitarian views and decreasing the influence of gender traditionalism, but has yet to convince a substantial minority that gender equality should extend to both public and private spheres of social life
Many skilled professional occupations are characterized by an early period of intensive skill accumulation and career establishment. Examples include law firm associates, surgical residents, and untenured faculty at research-intensive universities. High female exit rates are sometimes blamed on the inability of new mothers to survive the sustained negative productivity shock associated with childbearing and early childrearing in these environments. Gender-neutral family policies have been adopted in some professions in an attempt to "level the playing field." The gender-neutral tenure clock stopping policies adopted by the majority of research-intensive universities in the United States in recent decades are an excellent example. But to date, there is no empirical evidence showing that these policies help women. Using a unique dataset on the universe of assistant professor hires at top-50 economics departments from 1980-2005, we show that the adoption of gender-neutral tenure clock stopping policies substantially reduced female tenure rates while substantially increasing male tenure rates. However, these policies do not reduce the probability that either men or women eventually earn tenure in the profession.
The introduction of the parental leave benefit scheme in 2007 is widely regarded as a landmark reform that has shifted the German welfare state towards a model that better supports work and family life compatibility. In this article, we investigate whether and how this reform has affected men’s use of parental leave based on data from the German microcensus of 1999–2012. We find that parental leave usage has increased across all educational levels, but the shift has been strongest for university-educated fathers. Public sector employment is beneficial for men’s uptake of leave, while self-employment and temporary work lowers fathers’ chances of taking leave. The parental leave reform has not affected these associations much.
We examine the connection between fatherhood and employment hours using 30 years of data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP 1985-2014). By inspecting how actual hours, preferred hours, and the correspondence between actual and preferred hours change during fatherhood, we clarify the interplay between fathers' preferences and the labour market structures they encounter. We find that men born in 1960 or earlier prefer to (and are able to) increase their work hours slightly when they are fathers. Men born after 1960, in contrast, tend to prefer and achieve a slight reduction in work hours. Changes in fathers' actual and preferred work hours, however, are not an individual decision: they reflect the paid work involvement of their partners. Men in the older cohort only increase their hours significantly when their partner is not employed. Men in the younger cohort only reduce their hours significantly when their partner works full-time. Changes in fathers' work hours thus have become more supportive of wives' employment, but the size of fathers' work hour reductions remains substantively small. While our results suggest Germany is making progress towards equitable gender arrangements in the division of paid work, this progress remains slow.
We examine the effect of parenthood on the research productivity of academic economists. Combining the survey responses of nearly 10,000 economists with their publication records as documented in their RePEc accounts, we do not find that motherhood is associated with low research productivity. Nor do we find a statistically significant unconditional effect of a first child on research productivity. Conditional difference-in-differences estimates, however, suggest that the effect of parenthood on research productivity is negative for unmarried women and positive for untenured men. Moreover, becoming a mother before 30 years of age appears to have a detrimental effect on research productivity.
The paper contributes to the literature on gender gap in research investigating whether there is a gender gap in research evaluation. We use detailed data on 180,000 research papers evaluated during the Italian national research assessment (VQR 2004–2010) conducted by the Agency for the Evaluation of Universities and Research Institutes (Anvur). The data are merged with information on individual researchers and characteristics of referees. The most important empirical finding is that there is a significant gender gap in research evaluation. The gap is reduced once we control for researchers’ characteristics, such as age and academic rank, but is almost unaffected by the characteristics of the research output (monographs, journal articles, book chapters, etc.), co-authorships, international collaborations. Childbearing and maternity leaves do not account for the remaining gap in research evaluation. The evaluation method (peer review or bibliometric analysis) and the referee mix (whether men or women) do not disadvantage women. Analysis of a random sample of papers evaluated using bibliometric indicators and peer review reveals that bibliometric evaluation proves to be more favourable to women than peer review evaluation.
This article critically reviews recent literature on the relationship between family formation and academic-career progression, emphasizing obstacles women face seeking a tenured position and beyond. Evidence indicates that the pipeline model is dominated by “ideal worker” norms. These norms impose rigid, tightly coupled, sequential, time-bound requirements on aspiring academics, making the raising of young children and advancing an academic career incompatible. Studies indicate that women with PhDs and young children are disproportionately more likely to leak out of the tenure-track pipeline. Lack of family friendliness is one of the chief reasons why women opt out of tenure-track careers. One way to increase the proportion of tenured women is to adapt the pipeline model by bolstering institutional work–family policies and providing child care centers. Departmental leaders can ensure that making use of work–family policies does not negatively affect tenure decisions. Collecting longitudinal data to evaluate how well policies are working is critical.
The new generation of scholars differs in many ways from its predecessor of just a few decades ago. Academia once consisted largely of men in traditional single-earner families. Today, men and women fill the doctoral student ranks in nearly equal numbers and most will experience both the benefits and challenges of living in dual-income households. This generation also has new expectations and values, notably the desire for flexibility and balance between careers and other life goals. However, changes to the structure and culture of academia have not kept pace with young scholars’ desires for work-family balance.
Do Babies Matter? is the first comprehensive examination of the relationship between family formation and the academic careers of men and women. The book begins with graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, moves on to early and mid-career years, and ends with retirement. Individual chapters examine graduate school, how recent PhD recipients get into the academic game, the tenure process, and life after tenure. The authors explore the family sacrifices women often have to make to get ahead in academia and consider how gender and family interact to affect promotion to full professor, salaries, and retirement. Concrete strategies are suggested for transforming the university into a family-friendly environment at every career stage.
The book draws on over a decade of research using unprecedented data resources, including the Survey of Doctorate Recipients, a nationally representative panel survey of PhDs in America, and multiple surveys of faculty and graduate students at the ten-campus University of California system.
The problem of selection bias in economic and social statistics arises when a rule other than simple random sampling is used to sample the underlying population that is the object of interest. The distorted representation of a true population as a consequence of a sampling rule is the essence of the selection problem. Distorting selection rules may be the outcome of decisions of sample survey statisticians, self-selection decisions by the agents being studied or both.