Research

My research explores how gender and social inequality unfold across different spheres of life. I combine quantitative methods, experimental designs, and comparative approaches to understand how institutions shape individual outcomes in three main areas:

1. Work and Family Dynamics
2. Discrimination in the Labor Market
3. Academic Career Tracks

1. Work and Family Dynamics

How do policy structures and labor market institutions influence gendered family decisions? My current research bridges micro-level preferences, meso-level labor market organization, and macro-level welfare regimes to explore how work and family intersect.

Parental Leave Uptake and Justice Principles

To study distributive justice perceptions, I conducted a factorial survey experiment with vignettes that vary partner characteristics (gender, income, occupation, job satisfaction). You can view my most recent study — including hypotheses, methods, and results — in the poster below, presented at the Population Association of America (PAA) conference.

📄 Click here to open the poster in a new tab | 🔗 View pre-registration and preprint on OSF

🔗 View pre-registration and preprint on OSF

2. Discrimination in the Labor Market

What role does parenthood play in shaping labor market outcomes — and does it intersect with gender to create additional barriers? In this meta-analysis, we synthesize existing evidence on hiring discrimination against parents to understand how family roles influence professional opportunities.

Gender, Parenthood, and Hiring Discrimination: A Meta-Analysis

While field experiments have extensively documented discrimination in hiring — especially by gender and ethnicity — the role of parenthood, particularly when intersecting with gender, has received less attention. This project addresses that gap by synthesizing evidence from 20 correspondence audit studies (n = 208 experimental conditions) on hiring discrimination against parents.

The study investigates:

• Whether parents face disadvantages compared to childless applicants,
• Whether discrimination is more prevalent among mothers, and
• How discrimination varies by national family policies, occupational characteristics, and time.

Preliminary findings: Hiring discrimination against parents — particularly mothers — has declined over time and is no longer statistically significant in the most recent studies.

3. Academic Career Tracks

In a BMBF-funded project with Mark Lutter and Martin Schröder, we created a comprehensive panel dataset of all social scientists and economists at German universities. The goal: understand gendered dynamics in academic careers, from early stages to tenure.

Who Becomes a Tenured Professor?

We find no significant gender differences in tenure outcomes across most disciplines — contrary to federal statistics suggesting a leaky pipeline. The exception: in economics, women show slightly lower (but statistically insignificant) chances of tenure.

Who Leaves Academia?

In sociology, women are more likely to leave academia than men — even when controlling for productivity and CV characteristics.

• Women often exit during the pre-doc stage, while men leave more frequently during the post-doc stage.
• Parenthood plays a role: mothers are more likely to leave than fathers, though this doesn’t fully explain the gender gap in attrition.

Early Career Barriers

In psychology, women face disadvantages in obtaining a habilitation — a key qualification for professorships — independent of parental status or CV strength.