So far the question of the compatibility between a career in scientific work and having a family has been examined almost exclusively as a women's issue, with the emphasis repeatedly being placed mostly on the structural incompatibility of these two areas of life. Hence actions were predominantly focused on women. Today the work-life-balance in academic careers not only concerns women but also men, as demonstrated by recent research results showing an increasing number of childless male academics. The problem of balancing academic work and parenthood becomes more broadly relevant with the increasing number of dual career couples in academia.
Faced with the essential need to compete and the continuous internationalization of the academic world, the analysis of the specific situations of academics who want to compatibly arrange family responsibility for the own children with an academic career, becomes more and more relevant. This applies even more given that no data representing the fraction of parents among academic employees exists for Germany. And there are only a few studies on the labour situation and the career development of academics with children in Germany.
The relevant questions for identifying the structures that hinder the successful balancing of family and academic career are at which point in an academic career, and for what reasons do junior academics with families drop out of German academia.
The study ties in with essential research objectives, for example, by spreading the perspective and the sample across other groups such as male academics, or those having a status other than professor and also by analyzing possible interactions between individual generative aims and institutional conditions at German universities.
