Is There a Motherhood Penalty in Academia? The Gendered Effect of Children on Academic Publications in German Sociology

Abstract

Based on data that tracks curriculum vitae (CV) and publication records as well as survey information from sociologists in German academia, we examine the effects of parenthood on the publication output of male and female academics that were present in German universities or research institutes in the year 2013. Results indicate that having children leads to a significant decline in the number of publications by women on average, while not affecting the number of publications by men. However, the gendered effect of children on productivity hardly mitigates differences in publication output between men and women, as women still publish about 20 per cent less than men after controlling for the adverse effects of children on productivity. The gendered effect of childbearing depends partly on prior levels of women’s academic achievements, suggesting a mechanism of performance-driven self-selection. Lower-performing women tend to suffer a stronger motherhood penalty than better performing women, while the publication output of successful women (who have been granted academic awards) is not reduced through childbirth. The results indicate that women are better at managing the ‘double burden’ of kids and career if external, award-giving committees have bestowed prestige upon them or indicated their potential for a scientific career.

Publishing, signaling, social capital, and gender: Determinants of becoming a tenured professor in German political science

“…To sum up, ours is the first study to use a virtually complete sample of all German academic political scientists to show that women tend to be favored over men in the hiring process for tenured professorships, before and after controlling for various factors, most importantly productivity (but see [ 65 , 66 ] for the discipline of sociology in Germany). This means that women get hired with fewer measurable publications than men do, indicating that there is no bias against women when judging their competency, different from what other studies found [ 20 : 342, 44 : 3].…”

Equal but Inequitable: Who Benefits from Gender-Neutral Tenure Clock Stopping Policies?

“…Gender-neutral policies extend equal benefits to new mothers and fathers, whereas female-only policies are only available to women. 8 Both types of policies typically stop the tenure clock for one year for each new child, up to a maximum of two. Table 1 reports gender-neutral and female-only policy adoption dates for the universities in our sample.…”

“…Finkel, Olswang, and She (1994) find a large share of female faculty believe that using family friendly policies will hurt their career. 8 What we call female-only policies are sometimes instead called primary caregiver policies, and cover parents of either gender who provide more than 51 percent of caregiving activities. Gender-neutral policies sometimes require parents to have "significant" childcare responsibilities, but can be used simultaneously by both parents.…”

The importance of collaboration and supervisor behaviour for gender differences in doctoral student performance and early career development

“…Another body of research suggests that having children does have a negative effect on female research performance in comparison with male performance (see, e.g. Fox 1995;Fuchs, von Stebut, and Allmendinger 2001;Hunter and Leahey 2010;Ecklund and Lincoln 2011;Lutter and Schröder 2019). The results of Ginther and Kahn (2006) provide a more complex picture, suggesting that there are field-specific differences in the effect of having children and that the effect is very low in most research fields.…”