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Wir nehmen eine vergleichende Untersuchung der Nominierten und Preisträger:innen von sieben Buchpreisen im deutschsprachigen Raum vor, die mit einer vorab veröffentlichten Long- und/oder Shortlist arbeiten. Dazu vergleichen wir die Preise in Bezug auf soziodemographische Faktoren der Autor:innen (Geschlecht, Alter und Muttersprache), deren Bekanntheit zum Zeitpunkt der Nominierung (Aufrufe auf Wikipedia), die Anzahl vorheriger Nominierungen der Autor:innen für den gleichen Buchpreis, die ›Qualität‹ der ausgezeichneten Bücher (Anzahl der Rezensionen des nominierten Buches, positive bzw. negative Beurteilung in Rezensionen sowie die Einigkeit der Rezensent:innen darüber), das Ansehen der Verlage und die Geschlechterzusammensetzung der Jurys. Der Analysezeitraum umfasst 15 Jahre. Unser Datensatz beinhaltet Informationen zu 428 Autor:innen mit insgesamt 627 zwischen den Jahren 2005 und 2020 nominierten Büchern und 2.469 Rezensionen zu diesen Büchern. Der Datensatz wurde mittels mehrerer Methoden (z. B. Web-Scraping, Hand-Kodierung, Expert:innenbewertungen) aus verschiedenen Quellen (z. B. Web-Daten, Bibliothekskataloge, Expert:innenbewertungen) zusammengestellt. Auf diese Weise können wir unter anderem zeigen, dass für alle untersuchten Preise überwiegend deutsche Muttersprachler:innen mit gut rezensierten Büchern aus renommierten Verlagen nominiert werden und die Preise gewinnen.
Does working in a gender-atypical occupation reduce individuals’ likelihood of finding a different-sex romantic partner, and do such occupational partnership penalties contribute to occupational gender segregation? To answer this question, we theorized partnership penalties for working in gender-atypical occupations by drawing on insights from evolutionary psychology, social constructivism, and rational choice theory and exploited the stability of occupational pathways in Germany. In Study 1, we analyzed observational data from a national probability sample (N= 1,634,944) to assess whether individuals in gender-atypical occupations were less likely to be partnered than individuals who worked in gender typical occupations. To assess whether the observed partnership gaps found in Study 1 were causally related to the gender typicality of men’s and women’s occupations, we conducted a field experiment on a dating app (N = 6,778). Because the findings from Study 2 suggested that young women and men indeed experienced penalties for working in a gender-atypical occupation (at least when they were not highly attractive), we employed a choice-experimental design in Study 3 (N = 1,250) to assess whether women and men were aware of occupational partnership penalties and showed that anticipating occupational partnership penalties may keep young and highly educated women from working in gender-atypical occupations. Our main conclusion therefore is that that observed penalties and their anticipation seem to be driven by unconscious rather than conscious processes.
Organizational commitments to equality change how people view women’s and men’s professional success
(2024)
To address women’s underrepresentation in high-status positions, many organizations have committed to gender equality. But is women’s professional success viewed less positively when organizations commit to women’s advancement? Do equality commitments have positive effects on evaluations of successful men? We fielded a survey experiment with a national probability sample in Germany (N = 3229) that varied employees’ gender and their organization’s commitment to equality. Respondents read about a recently promoted employee and rated how decisive of a role they thought intelligence and effort played in getting the employee promoted from 1 “Not at all decisive” to 7 “Very decisive” and the fairness of the promotion from 1 “Very unfair” to 7 “Very fair.” When organizations committed to women’s advancement rather than uniform performance standards, people believed intelligence and effort were less decisive in women’s promotions, but that intelligence was more decisive in men’s promotions. People viewed women’s promotions as least fair and men’s as most fair in organizations committed to women’s advancement. However, women’s promotions were still viewed more positively than men’s in all conditions and on all outcomes, suggesting people believed that organizations had double standards for success that required women to be smarter and work harder to be promoted, especially in organizations that did not make equality commitments.
Money matters!
(2024)
This paper examines the context dependency of attitudes toward maternal employment. We test three sets of factors that may affect these attitudes—economic benefits, normative obligations, and child-related consequences—by analyzing data from a unique survey experimental design implemented in a large-scale household panel survey in Germany (17,388 observations from 3,494 respondents). Our results show that the economic benefits associated with maternal employment are the most important predictor of attitudes supporting maternal employment. Moreover, we find that attitudes toward maternal employment vary by individual, household, and contextual characteristics (in particular, childcare quality). We interpret this variation as an indication that negative attitudes toward maternal employment do not necessarily reflect gender essentialism; rather, gender role attitudes are contingent upon the frames individuals have in mind.
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.
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.
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.
Who suffered most?
(2022)
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.
Although mothers and fathers in almost all rich democracies are entitled to some form of paid parenting leave, fathers in particular do not take all the leave available to them. As employers play an important role in the implementation of parenting leave policies, this chapter investigates which workplace characteristics influence mothers' and fathers' uptake of their statutory leave entitlements. In Part 1, we estimate the size of the gap between statutory leave entitlement and leave uptake across genders and countries by combining data from the OECD and the European Labor Force Survey. In Parts 2 and 3, we review the literature on structural, cultural, and normative explanations for the gap in parenting leave uptake. We conclude the chapter with suggestions for further research, including the need for reliable data on the size of the implementation gap and research on non-European countries.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This article draws on the experience from an ongoing research project employing respondent-driven sampling (RDS) to survey (illicit) 24-hour home care workers. We highlight issues around the preparatory work and the fielding of the survey to provide researchers with useful insights on how to implement RDS when surveying populations for which the method has not yet been used. We conclude the article with ethical considerations that occur when employing RDS.
Under what conditions do young precarious workers join unions? Based on case studies from France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States, the authors identify targeted campaigns, coalition building, membership activism, and training activities as innovative organizing approaches. In addition to traditional issues such as wages and training quality, these approaches also featured issues specific to precarious workers, including skills training, demands for minimum working hours, and specific support in insecure employment situations. Organizing success is influenced by bargaining structures, occupational identity, labor market conditions, and support by union leaders and members. Innovative organizing tends to happen when unions combine new approaches with existing structures.
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.