Help
Recent empirical studies provide evidence in favour of an equalization of male and female educational chances on the tertiary level. According to predictions of the Fed- eral Office for Statistics, the proportion of women completing a master’s or equivalent degree will peak in 2010 at 52% and will thereafter remain approximately at this level. In comparison to 1978 – the first year in which the Swiss Higher Education Information System (SHIS) collected data about first degrees – the proportion of women among the graduates on the master’s level has more than doubled,1 although the proportion of women and men substantially varies in the different disciplines (Franzen, Hecken and Kopp, 2004).
This paper tackles the question if gender inequalities develop after the com- pletion of a master’s degree while starting an academic career – both in a historical perspective as well as in the perspective of the life cycle of the individuals – and which factors determine the academic integration. Can we observe a convergence in gender specific academic career trajectories, or are gender sensitive selection processes postponed to later career steps? The latter effect is metaphorically referred to as the “Leaky Pipeline” in academic careers (European Commission, 2008, 16 ff.).
The initial step in an academic career is determined by the completion of a doctorate, although some subject areas inside the German-speaking university system additionally require a habilitation before entering the stage of senior faculty. For that reason, we investigate in the first part of our analyses – based on records about individual educational career paths of different cohorts of graduates – the gendered structure of the transition from master’s degree to doctoral studies, as well as the completion of a habilitation after the doctorate. Do female graduates begin
a doctoral thesis as often as male graduates and do they finalise it at the same rate as men do? Do we find any gender differences in the completion of a habilitation after the award of a doctorate?
After completion of the doctorate, some graduates leave the academic field and start a qualified job in other business sectors (Engelage and Hadjar, 2008). This dropout is to be expected, since on the one hand, the labour market outside of academia provides attractive positions for doctoral graduates, and on the other hand, the academic career path involves elite recruitment processes, with only a small proportion of candidates being selected for a tenured position as a professor. In the second part of the paper we concentrate on the factors that may explain these gendered dropout rates.
Two questions are leading our analyses. First, do women have more problems than men to stay integrated in the academic field during their postdoc phase? We investigate this question – based on a comprehensive panel dataset – focusing on whether young female researchers are equally well integrated in national and in- ternational academic networks. The personal network of academic contacts serves as an indicator for the quality and dimension of academic integration after the doctorate as there are no clear and measurable career steps at the upper levels of the academic ladder in Switzerland (ladder without rungs). Furthermore, research findings point to the fact that publication productivity and achieved academic posi- tions are positively influenced by the quality and dimension of the network (e.g., Leemann, 2002, Prpic, 1996).
Second, we analyse the internal and external factors that influence the in- tegration into the scientific community, with a particular focus on the effects of family situation (birth of children), the integration in the academic field during the doctorate, as well as the support provided by research funding in earlier stages of the career.