Publications

It continues to be a puzzle that women are disproportionally often dropping out of academic careers. Researchers and policymakers have suggested that same-gender supervisors are important for tightening this ‘leaky pipeline’. Especially in subjects with a strong overrepresentation of men, it seems likely that female supervisors work as positive role models and help preventing discrimination. Anticipating this effect, female doctoral students might also prefer supervisors of the same gender. Therefore, we ask how widespread a gender match is between doctoral student and supervisor in Germany and whether a gender match between supervisors and doctoral students is beneficial for the doctorate and for a possible scientific career thereafter.

This paper investigates the relationship between age and attaining a tenured position in academia. Following considerations about ageism towards doctoral graduates who were 40 years and older upon attaining a PhD and Robert K. Merton’s idea of cumulative advantages in academic careers, we differentiate between biological and academic age. We test the relationships and the resources accumulated behind the latter using data from the DZHW PhD Panel 2014. Applying piecewise constant exponential estimations and an entropy balancing, we find that PhDs aged 40+ experience a significantly positive effect on attaining a professorship at a university of applied science or receiving tenure as a postdoctoral researcher.

While recent research has investigated what signals of academic performance govern academics’ access to professorships, whether the power of such signals varies across disciplines has to date hardly been examined. We argue that the signaling power of academic achievements depends on the discipline-specific degree of standardization of research and on the spatio-temporal universality of research objects. Using a factorial survey experiment with Germany-based university professors of German studies, selected social sciences, and chemistry, we investigate the suitability of fictitious candidates for a tenured professorship (N respondents = 874, N vignettes = 6354).

wgtdistrim trims extreme sampling weights using the weight distribution approach suggested by Potter (1990). The reciprocal of the sampling weights are assumed to follow a (scaled) beta distribution. The parameters of the beta distribution are estimated from the sampling weights and the trimming levels (cut-offs) are computed for the specified percentiles. Sampling weights that are more extreme than the specified percentiles are trimmed to these percentiles and the excess is distributed equally among the untrimmed sampling weights so that the sum of the trimmed sampling weights equals the sum of the untrimmed sampling weights. This process is repeated a specified number of times (or until the trimmed sampling weights do no longer change).

This publication documents all variables and constructs that were used to observe (prospective) teachers from the beginning of teacher training through the preparatory service and into the profession within the framework of the Student Teacher Panel (LAP). The LAP-study is closely linked to the Starting Cohort Students (SC5) of the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS). Since autumn 2014, the LAP project has not only been able to further incorporate the oversample of teacher trainees in the NEPS student cohort but also to integrate a teacher specific survey program into the SC5 surveys.

Work is a central area of human life, and work-associated stress can affect health over a long period of time. From a health sociological perspective, it was assumed in this paper that education as a resource is able to support the management of stress(ors) and thus has a positive impact on health. Data from the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS): Starting Cohort 6 – Adults, was used and a cross-sectional analysis was performed. Linear regression models were estimated to analyse the effect of stressors at the workplace on work-related stress. The results show that more well-educated people show a lower level of stress, net of stressors and additional controls.