Objectives

The research objective is to analyze the present situation at German universities and the conditions that are whether conducive or obstructive to supporting compatibility of the different areas of life.

This requires appraisal of the compatibility of academic work as a profession and family. For this it is essential to assess the life and the labor situation of academics with children as well as to identify possible barriers to compatibility. Querying childless academics should also reveal some internal academic barriers to starting a family. Questions on the individual environment regarding life-situation in the partnership will also be explored indirectly by the respondents, allowing for analysis of the different forms of partnership and the vocational as well as the private role segmentation in connection to lifestyle with or without children. Asking both women and men of all career levels in academia enables factors to be named which on the one hand, can lead to a stepwise dropping out from a career and respectively to a stepwise neglect of the desire to have children, while on the other hand it can afford the compatibility of academia and family. The outcome of the results should be concrete recommendations for courses of action in higher education policy.

In particular the following aspects will be surveyed:

• Recent life and work situation as well as subjectively measured career options of academics with children.
• Structural conditions of academic organizations or institutions and their effects on the decisions about whether or not to start a family.
• Analysis of the causes behind career dropout and stagnation of career caught in between academic structures and models of compatibility.
• Barriers to realizing work-life-balance at universities.
• Individual strategies for coping with vocational and familial requirements.
• Proportion of dual career couples and the specific consequences related to this way of life.
• Interdependencies between conditions of the different cultures in different disciplines and forms of organizations with generative decisions and life-situations as mother or father in the academic field.
• Recommendations for optimizing the configuration of work conditions of academics