Project purpose

The idea to initiate the research project "Wege in die Wissenschaft" ("Scientific career paths") came into being in 1997. Within the context of organisational-sociological reserach, the question concerning professional mechanism for inclusion and exclusion in university careers emerged. The project is based on the observation that female academics are underrepresented in academic leading positions, irrespective of their level of education. The decrease of women at universities is a nationwide phenomenon. Either women leave university at the end of their studies or after they finish thier doctorate. At the University of Wuppertal, this phenomenon was to be analysed at local level. The central question was: "What criteria turns an academic career path into career for men?".

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Phases of the project

At first, the research project "Wege in die Wissenschaft" ("Scientific careers paths") focused on doctoral phase and shed light on the perspective of university lectures and doctoral researcher. The project concluded with the analysis of the habilitation phase.

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Results of research

It is an important finding of this project that post-graduates almost universally describe a doctorate and a habilitation as a long period of dependency allied with a high professional risk and uncertain career prospects. Supervision of doctoral researchers is a marginally formalised procedure and extremely unequal in terms of gender and the affiliation to a specific subject. The same applies to the support postdoctoral researchers receive from their superior. Supervision and professional support depend on how much importance the university lecturer assigns to young academics. In this context, strategies for career planning seem to be irrelevant. This applies equally to women and men.

An open devaluation of junior researcher rarely takes place. However, female academics are continuously confronted with the prejudice that they completely lack personality traits considered important for a scientific career. According to this prejudice, women do not lack intelligence, because their partners take care of their family. At first glance, it may appear that a traditional allocation of roles support the career of a man. In fact, women do not only take care of the family, but they close financial gaps resulting their partners academic career by pursuing a working career.

The interviewees - female academics with children - indicated that there was no equivalent private or institutionalised system of support, and, above all, a child officially seals the female deficits in the academic personality (i.e. career orientation, determination, etc.). As a result, female academics with one or more children feel even more challenged to prove their academic excellence and academic aptitude than childless academics.

The diffiulties of reconciling family and work life becomes clear immediately with a further point. Those few mean, who derivate from the traditional image of a father figure and admit to an active role in parenting are discredited in terms of their academic profile like women.

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