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Existing theories of aging suggest that there may be similarities and differences in how COVID-19 impacts older people’s psychosocial adaptation compared to younger age groups, particularly middle-aged individuals. To assess the degree to which these impacts vary, we analyzed data from 3098 participants between the ages of 40 and 79 from an online survey in Germany. Data were collected at three measurement occasions between the start of the nationwide lockdown in mid-March 2020 and the end of the lockdown in early August 2020. The survey focused on everyday experiences during the COVID-19 crisis and collected various satisfaction ratings (e.g., general life satisfaction, satisfaction with family life, satisfaction with social contacts). At baseline, participants also provided retrospective ratings of satisfaction for the period before the COVID-19 crisis. In our analyses, we compared satisfaction ratings of middle-aged (40–64 years) and older individuals (65–79 years) and found that both middle-aged and older participants experienced the greatest decreases in satisfaction with social contacts, with more pronounced decreases seen in middle-aged participants. A similar pattern was observed for general life satisfaction, but the overall decreases were less pronounced in both groups compared to the decreases in satisfaction with social contacts. We also observed a partial recovery effect in all measures at the last measurement occasion, and this effect was more pronounced in older adults. Findings were also confirmed using age as a continuous variable and checking for linear and nonlinear effects of outcomes across the age range. Although ageism arose during the pandemic in the sense that older adults were labeled as a “risk group,” particularly at the start of the outbreak, we found consistently with other studies that middle-aged adults’ satisfaction decreased to a greater extent than that of older adults.
Cross-national variation in the relationship between welfare generosity and single mother employment
(2022)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Führung in Teilzeit?
(2023)
Teilzeitarbeit in Führungsetagen ist eine Ausnahme, obwohl das Thema Arbeitszeitreduzierung durch veränderte 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 eingeführte Rückkehrrecht auf einen Vollzeitarbeitsplatz nach zeitlich begrenzten Arbeitszeitreduktionen etwas geändert. Dieser Beitrag nutzt Daten der Europäischen Arbeitskräfteerhebung, um Teilzeitarbeit von Führungskräften in Deutschland sowohl im zeitlichen als auch im internationalen Vergleich einzuordnen und damit ein empirisches Fundament für die gesellschaftliche Diskussion um Teilzeitführungskräfte zu legen. Die Auswertungen zeigen: In Deutschland arbeiteten im Jahr 2019 laut eigener Aussage rund 14 % der Führungskräfte in Teilzeit. Im europäischen Vergleich gehört Deutschland damit zu den Ländern mit dem höchsten Anteil an teilzeitarbeitenden Führungskräften. Die Auswertungen zeigen auch, dass in Deutschland der Anteil der weiblichen Führungskräfte in Teilzeit mit rund 32 % deutlich über dem der männlichen Führungskräfte liegt (rund 3 %) und es große Unterschiede nach Altersgruppen gibt. Als Motiv für eine Arbeitszeitreduktion geben Führungskräfte, insbesondere Frauen, zumeist Pflege- und Betreuungsverpflichtungen an.
Wie hat sich die COVID-19 Pandemie auf geschlechtsspezifische Ungleichheiten im Arbeitsleben und dem subjektiven Wohlbefinden Erwerbstätiger ausgewirkt? Zur Beantwortung dieser Frage analysiert dieser Beitrag drei Wellen einer nicht zufallsbasierten Onlinestichprobe für den Zeitraum Mitte März bis Anfang August 2020 und umfassen damit den Zeitraum des ersten Lockdowns. Die Ergebnisse unserer multivariaten Analysen zeigen: Frauen, Eltern und insbesondere Mütter waren überdurchschnittlich von Arbeitszeitreduzierungen betroffen. Bei der Wahrscheinlichkeit im Homeoffice zu arbeiten gab es nur geringfügige Unterschiede nach Geschlecht und Familiensituation. Die Zufriedenheit mit der Arbeit, dem Familienleben und dem Leben insgesamt ging bei Frauen, Eltern und insbesondere Müttern überproportional stark zurück. Die beobachteten Unterschiede verringern sich gegen Ende des Lockdowns wieder, jedoch unterschiedlich stark für die einzelnen Ergebnisdimensionen.
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.
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.