@article{HippKonrad2022, author = {Hipp, Lena and Konrad, Markus}, title = {Has Covid-19 increased gender inequalities in professional advancement?}, series = {Journal of family research}, volume = {34}, journal = {Journal of family research}, number = {1}, publisher = {University of Bamberg Press}, address = {Bamberg}, issn = {2699-2337}, doi = {10.20377/jfr-697}, pages = {134 -- 160}, year = {2022}, abstract = {Objective: This article analyzed gender differences in professional advancement following the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic based on data from open-source software developers in 37 countries. Background: Men and women may have been affected differently from the social distancing measures implemented to contain the Covid-19 pandemic. Given that men and women tend to work in different jobs and that they have been unequally involved in childcare duties, school and workplace closings may have impacted men's and women's professional lives unequally. Method: We analyzed original data from the world's largest social coding community, GitHub. We first estimated a Holt-Winters forecast model to compare the predicted and the observed average weekly productivity of a random sample of male and female developers (N=177,480) during the first lockdown period in 2020. To explain the crosscountry variation in the gendered effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on software developers' productivity, we estimated two-way fixed effects models with different lockdown measures as predictors - school and workplace closures, in particular. Results: In most countries, both male and female developers were, on average, more productive than predicted, and productivity increased for both genders with increasing lockdown stringency. When examining the effects of the most relevant types of lockdown measures separately, we found that stay-at-home restrictions increased both men's and women's productivity and that workplace closures also increased the number of weekly contributions on average - but for women, only when schools were open. Conclusion: Having found gender differences in the effect of workplace closures contingent on school and daycare closures within a population that is relatively young and unlikely to have children (software developers), we conclude that the Covid-19 pandemic may indeed have contributed to increased gender inequalities in professional advancement.}, language = {en} } @misc{Hipp2018, author = {Hipp, Lena}, title = {Rezension zu: A. L. Kalleberg \& S. P. Vallas (Eds.): Precarious Work. - United Kingdom : Emerald Publishing, 2018 (Research in the Sociology of Work; 31). - 463 pp. - ISBN 978-1-78743-288-8}, series = {Work and occupations : an international sociological journal}, volume = {46}, journal = {Work and occupations : an international sociological journal}, number = {1}, publisher = {Sage Publ.}, address = {Thousand Oaks}, issn = {0730-8884}, doi = {10.1177/0730888418810071}, pages = {103 -- 105}, year = {2018}, abstract = {Work has become more precarious in recent years. Although this claim is more or less uncontested among social scientists, there are a still many questions that have not yet been conclusively answered. What exactly constitutes precariousness? How should it be operationalized and measured? How does the character of precarious employment vary across organizations, occupations, demographic groups, and countries? The edited volume by Arne Kalleberg and Steven Vallas seeks to provide answers to these and related questions. Sociologists from around the world employed different methodologies in a broad range of economic sectors and countries to identify the origins, manifestations, and consequences of precarious work. The different contributions not only illustrate the great heterogeneity that exists within precarious employment but also point to some central features of precarious work independent of the geographical context in which it occurs. Moreover, they highlight some challenges for the study of precarious work. First, drawing on their earlier work, Kalleberg and Vallas conceptualize precarious employment as work that is characterized by uncertainty and insecurity with regard to pay and the stability of the work arrangement; workers in precarious jobs only have limited access to social benefits and statutory protections and bear the entrepreneurial risk of the employment relationship. This broad definition not only captures various forms of nonstandard employment, such as temporary employment, part-time work, or one-person businesses, but also covers informal workers or workers who are at risk of losing their jobs. Nonetheless, this definition does not seem to be broad enough or specific enough to fit the needs of all types of research and to appropriately capture the multifaceted nature of precarious work. Kiersztyn, for example, shows the necessity to distinguish between objective and subjective insecurities when measuring precarious work. Likewise, Rogan et al. point out that the concept of "precarious employment" has little resonance in the developing world, where most of the workforce is at or near poverty and informal work is the default employment type. Second, the book repeatedly illustrates that the increase in precarious work can be attributed to the rise of neoliberal doctrines and practices, the deinstitutionalization of organized workers, and the dismantling of the welfare state. This applies not only to the United States, where market logics have often been equated with economic freedom, but also to countries like Germany with its corporatist tradition and a strong welfare state (Brady and Biegert) as well as to emerging economies like India (Sapkal and Sundar). In the opening chapter, Pulignano, moreover, convincingly argues that the institutional determinants of precariousness should not only be sought at the national level but that the supranational context plays a major role when it comes to explain precarity. Third, by focusing on different aspects of precariousness and employment, the book shows the need for differentiation when studying precarious work. This is nicely illustrated by the following three chapters, which draw different conclusions on the gendered nature of precarious employment. Wallace and Kwak study the rise of "bad jobs" in U.S. metropolitan areas and show that men's work became more precarious during the Great Financial Crisis. By contrast, Banch and Hanley, who have investigated the prevalence of different forms of nonstandard work since the 1980s in the United States, show that the risk of working in precarious jobs has declined over time for men. Likewise, Witteveen shows that the employment trajectories of young men are less precarious than those of young women in the United States. These seemingly contradictory claims stem from the fact that the authors focused on different aspects of precariousness, used different methodologies and datasets, and took on slightly different populations and time frames. The work on precarious work is hence not yet done. Fourth, precarious work is certainly no longer a characteristic of those with low levels of education but has increasingly become common among professional and technical workers as well. It might come in disguise and is oftentimes perceived as an opportunity, a means for career advancement, and a personal choice. These disguises and perceptions are evident in chapters by Zukin and Papadantonakis on the unpaid work performed by programmers in hackathons, the chapter by Rao on young professionals in international organizations, and to some degree also the chapter by Williams on professional female workers in the oil and gas industry. These insights (and more that are not mentioned here) make the book relevant and interesting to read. A summary chapter to synthesize the diverse findings and potentially also outline some of the methodological challenges in the study of precarious work would have had been a nice close of the book. Furthermore, such a summation would have been the place to speculate about the consequences of recent changes in the world of work, such as the rise of the gig economy and cloud or crowd work, which add new forms of precarity to the ones that we have known thus far. Although it has primarily been written for an academic audience, the book is a highly commendable and enjoyable read for both social scientists and practitioners such as labor activists, human resources managers, and policy makers. Moreover, the book is certainly a valuable teaching resource suitable for graduate and master's seminars in sociology due to its broad coverage of various aspects of precariousness, geographical regions, and methodological approaches.}, language = {en} } @article{Hipp2020, author = {Hipp, Lena}, title = {Do hiring practices penalize women and benefit men for having children?}, series = {European sociological review}, volume = {36}, journal = {European sociological review}, number = {2}, publisher = {Oxford Univ. Press}, address = {Oxford}, issn = {0266-7215}, doi = {10.1093/esr/jcz056}, pages = {250 -- 264}, year = {2020}, abstract = {Although observational studies from many countries have consistently shown that motherhood negatively affects women's wages, experimental findings on its effect on the likelihood of being hired are less conclusive. Motherhood penalties in hiring have been reported in the United States, the prototypical liberal market economy, but not in Sweden, the prototypical social-democratic welfare state. Based on a field experiment in Germany, this study examines the effects of parenthood on hiring processes in the prototypical conservative welfare state. My findings indicate that job recruitment processes indeed penalize women but not men for having children. In addition to providing theoretical explanations for why motherhood penalties in hiring are particularly likely to occur in the German context, this study also highlights several methodological and practical issues that should be considered when conducting correspondence studies to examine labour market discrimination.}, language = {en} } @article{MunnesHarschKnoblochetal.2022, author = {Munnes, Stefan and Harsch, Corinna and Knobloch, Marcel and Vogel, Johannes S. and Hipp, Lena and Schilling, Erik}, title = {Examining Sentiment in Complex Texts. A Comparison of Different Computational Approaches}, series = {Frontiers in Big Data}, volume = {5}, journal = {Frontiers in Big Data}, publisher = {Frontiers Media}, address = {Lausanne}, issn = {2624-909X}, doi = {10.3389/fdata.2022.886362}, pages = {16}, year = {2022}, abstract = {Can we rely on computational methods to accurately analyze complex texts? To answer this question, we compared different dictionary and scaling methods used in predicting the sentiment of German literature reviews to the "gold standard " of human-coded sentiments. Literature reviews constitute a challenging text corpus for computational analysis as they not only contain different text levels-for example, a summary of the work and the reviewer's appraisal-but are also characterized by subtle and ambiguous language elements. To take the nuanced sentiments of literature reviews into account, we worked with a metric rather than a dichotomous scale for sentiment analysis. The results of our analyses show that the predicted sentiments of prefabricated dictionaries, which are computationally efficient and require minimal adaption, have a low to medium correlation with the human-coded sentiments (r between 0.32 and 0.39). The accuracy of self-created dictionaries using word embeddings (both pre-trained and self-trained) was considerably lower (r between 0.10 and 0.28). Given the high coding intensity and contingency on seed selection as well as the degree of data pre-processing of word embeddings that we found with our data, we would not recommend them for complex texts without further adaptation. While fully automated approaches appear not to work in accurately predicting text sentiments with complex texts such as ours, we found relatively high correlations with a semiautomated approach (r of around 0.6)-which, however, requires intensive human coding efforts for the training dataset. In addition to illustrating the benefits and limits of computational approaches in analyzing complex text corpora and the potential of metric rather than binary scales of text sentiment, we also provide a practical guide for researchers to select an appropriate method and degree of pre-processing when working with complex texts.}, language = {en} } @article{BiegertBradyHipp2022, author = {Biegert, Thomas and Brady, David and Hipp, Lena}, title = {Cross-national variation in the relationship between welfare generosity and single mother employment}, series = {The annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science}, volume = {702}, journal = {The annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science}, number = {1}, publisher = {SAGE Publishing}, address = {Thousand Oaks}, issn = {0002-7162}, doi = {10.1177/00027162221120760}, pages = {37 -- 54}, year = {2022}, abstract = {Reform of the U.S. welfare system in 1996 spurred claims that cuts to welfare programs effectively incentivized single mothers to find employment. It is difficult to assess the veracity of those claims, however, absent evidence of how the relationship between welfare benefits and single mother employment generalizes across countries. This study combines data from the European Union Labour Force Survey and the U.S. Current Population Survey (1992-2015) into one of the largest samples of single mothers ever, testing the relationships between welfare generosity and single mothers' employment and work hours. We find no consistent evidence of a negative relationship between welfare generosity and single mother employment outcomes. Rather, we find tremendous cross-national heterogeneity, which does not clearly correspond to well-known institutional variations. Our findings demonstrate the limitations of single country studies and the pervasive, salient interactions between institutional contexts and social policies.}, language = {en} } @incollection{HippSauermannStuth2023, author = {Hipp, Lena and Sauermann, Armin and Stuth, Stefan}, title = {F{\"u}hrung in Teilzeit?}, series = {Teilzeitf{\"u}hrung}, booktitle = {Teilzeitf{\"u}hrung}, editor = {Karlshaus, Anja and Kaehler, Boris}, edition = {2., vollst{\"a}ndig {\"u}berarbeitete und erweiterte Auflage}, publisher = {Springer}, address = {Wiesbaden}, isbn = {978-3-658-40125-2}, doi = {10.1007/978-3-658-40126-9_4}, pages = {79 -- 94}, year = {2023}, abstract = {Teilzeitarbeit in F{\"u}hrungsetagen ist eine Ausnahme, obwohl das Thema Arbeitszeitreduzierung durch ver{\"a}nderte Familienarrangements und zunehmende berufliche Belastung wichtiger geworden ist. Daran hat weder der seit mehr als 20 Jahren bestehende Rechtsanspruch auf einen Teilzeitarbeitsplatz noch das im Jahr 2019 eingef{\"u}hrte R{\"u}ckkehrrecht auf einen Vollzeitarbeitsplatz nach zeitlich begrenzten Arbeitszeitreduktionen etwas ge{\"a}ndert. Dieser Beitrag nutzt Daten der Europ{\"a}ischen Arbeitskr{\"a}fteerhebung, um Teilzeitarbeit von F{\"u}hrungskr{\"a}ften in Deutschland sowohl im zeitlichen als auch im internationalen Vergleich einzuordnen und damit ein empirisches Fundament f{\"u}r die gesellschaftliche Diskussion um Teilzeitf{\"u}hrungskr{\"a}fte zu legen. Die Auswertungen zeigen: In Deutschland arbeiteten im Jahr 2019 laut eigener Aussage rund 14 \% der F{\"u}hrungskr{\"a}fte in Teilzeit. Im europ{\"a}ischen Vergleich geh{\"o}rt Deutschland damit zu den L{\"a}ndern mit dem h{\"o}chsten Anteil an teilzeitarbeitenden F{\"u}hrungskr{\"a}ften. Die Auswertungen zeigen auch, dass in Deutschland der Anteil der weiblichen F{\"u}hrungskr{\"a}fte in Teilzeit mit rund 32 \% deutlich {\"u}ber dem der m{\"a}nnlichen F{\"u}hrungskr{\"a}fte liegt (rund 3 \%) und es große Unterschiede nach Altersgruppen gibt. Als Motiv f{\"u}r eine Arbeitszeitreduktion geben F{\"u}hrungskr{\"a}fte, insbesondere Frauen, zumeist Pflege- und Betreuungsverpflichtungen an.}, language = {de} } @article{Hipp2020, author = {Hipp, Lena}, title = {Feeling secure vs. being secure?}, series = {Contemporary social science}, volume = {15}, journal = {Contemporary social science}, number = {4}, publisher = {Routledge, Taylor \& Francis Group}, address = {Abingdon}, issn = {2158-2041}, doi = {10.1080/21582041.2019.1656816}, pages = {416 -- 429}, year = {2020}, abstract = {How can labour market institutions make workers confident about their economic future? While quantitative studies have repeatedly shown that countries' labour market regulations and policies are related to variations in workers' perceived job security, these studies did not explain how these institutions affect workers' perceptions and expectations. This study seeks to close this gap by analysing qualitative interview data collected on employees in Germany and the U.S. during the great financial crisis (2009-2010). The study's main finding is that policies vary in their effectiveness at making workers feel secure about their jobs. While unemployment assistance can reduce workers' worries about job loss, dismissal protection does not seem to effectively increase workers' confidence that their jobs are secure. Overall, employees know relatively little about the policies and regulations that are meant to protect them and have limited trust in their effectiveness. Individual and organisational characteristics seem to be more relevant for employees' feelings of job security than national-level policies. In particular, comparisons with others who have lower levels of protection increase workers' perceived security. These insights are particularly important in light of the ongoing changes in the world of work that are making workers' lives more uncertain and insecure.}, language = {en} } @article{LiBuenningKaiseretal.2022, author = {Li, Jianghong and B{\"u}nning, Mareike and Kaiser, Till and Hipp, Lena}, title = {Who suffered most?}, series = {Journal of family research}, volume = {34}, journal = {Journal of family research}, number = {1}, publisher = {University of Bamberg Press}, address = {Bamberg}, issn = {2699-2337}, doi = {10.20377/jfr-704}, pages = {281 -- 309}, year = {2022}, abstract = {Objective: This study examines gender and socioeconomic inequalities in parental psychological wellbeing (parenting stress and psychological distress) during the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany. Background: The dramatic shift of childcare and schooling responsibility from formal institutions to private households during the pandemic has put families under enormous stress and raised concerns about caregivers' health and wellbeing. Despite the overwhelming media attention to families' wellbeing, to date limited research has examined parenting stress and parental psychological distress during the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly in Germany. Method: We analyzed four waves of panel data (N= 1,771) from an opt-in online survey, which was conducted between March 2020 and April 2021. Multivariable OLS regressions were used to estimate variations in the pandemic's effects on parenting stress and psychological distress by various demographic and socioeconomic characteristics. Results: Overall, levels of parenting stress and psychological distress increased during the pandemic. During the first and third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, mothers, parents with children younger than 11 years, parents with two or more children, parents working from home as well as parents with financial insecurity experienced higher parenting stress than other sociodemographic groups. Moreover, women, respondents with lower incomes, single parents, and parents with younger children experienced higher levels of psychological distress than other groups. Conclusion: Gender and socioeconomic inequalities in parents' psychological wellbeing increased among the study participants during the pandemic.}, language = {en} } @article{BuenningHipp2022, author = {B{\"u}nning, Mareike and Hipp, Lena}, title = {How can we become more equal?}, series = {Journal of European social policy}, volume = {32}, journal = {Journal of European social policy}, number = {2}, publisher = {Sage Publ.}, address = {London}, issn = {0958-9287}, doi = {10.1177/09589287211035701}, pages = {182 -- 196}, year = {2022}, abstract = {This study examines how public policies affect parents' preferences for a more egalitarian division of paid and unpaid work. Based on the assumption that individuals develop their preferences within a specific policy context, we examine how changes in three policies affect mothers' and fathers' work-family preferences: the availability of high-quality, affordable childcare; the right to return to a full-time job after having reduced hours to part-time and an increase in the number of 'partner months' in parental leave schemes. Analysing a unique probability sample of parents with young children in Germany from 2015 (N = 1756), we find that fathers would want to work slightly fewer hours if they had the right to return to a full-time position after working part-time, and mothers would want to work slightly more hours if childcare opportunities were improved. Full-time working parents, moreover, are found to prefer fewer hours independent of the policy setting, while non-employed parents would like to work at least some hours. Last but not least, our analyses show that increasing the number of partner months in the parental leave scheme considerably increases fathers' preferences for longer and mothers' preferences for shorter leave. Increasing the number of partner months in parental schemes hence has the greatest potential to increase gender equality.}, language = {en} } @article{HippBuenning2020, author = {Hipp, Lena and B{\"u}nning, Mareike}, title = {Parenthood as a driver of increased genderinequality during COVID-19?}, series = {European societies}, volume = {23}, journal = {European societies}, publisher = {Taylor \& Francis Group}, address = {London}, issn = {1461-6696}, doi = {10.1080/14616696.2020.1833229}, pages = {S658 -- S673}, year = {2020}, abstract = {Drawing on three waves of survey data from a non-probability sample from Germany, this paper examines two opposing expectations about the pandemic's impacts on gender equality: The optimistic view suggests that gender equality has increased, as essential workers in Germany have been predominantly female and as fathers have had more time for childcare. The pessimistic view posits that lockdowns have also negatively affected women's jobs and that mothers had to shoulder the additional care responsibilities. Overall, our exploratory analyses provide more evidence supporting the latter view. Parents were more likely than non-parents to work fewer hours during the pandemic than before, and mothers were more likely than fathers to work fewer hours once lockdowns were lifted. Moreover, even though parents tended to divide childcare more evenly, at least temporarily, mothers still shouldered more childcare work than fathers. The division of housework remained largely unchanged. It is therefore unsurprising that women, in particular mothers, reported lower satisfaction during the observation period. Essential workers experienced fewer changes in their working lives than respondents in other occupations.}, language = {en} }