Gender inequality in German academia and strategies for change.
| Verfasser | Majcher, Agnieszka |
Abstract
Historically, women were excluded from higher education and academia. Nowadays they constitute half or often the majority of students in most European countries. Nevertheless women are still under-represented in scientific careers and leadership positions. Against this background the purpose of this article is twofold: Firstly, we want to examine the position of women in German academia and to identify those obstacles, which may affect the advancement of women in the academic hierarchy, based on the research being carried out within the WEU project framework (1). Secondly, we will give an overview of positive action measures, which are inaugurated in Germany in order to achieve equality in academia.
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Women's entry into German academia
The history of the German universities dates back to the Middle Ages. During this period, universities were not only the place where new ideas were generated, but also the place where the "servants" of the Church and the State were trained--for those positions from which women were banned. The Renaissance and Reformation gave a new impetus to the university development and a few new institutions were founded. However, this did not change the situation with regard to women. In the modern era the process of secularization started with the universities being the place where civil servants were to be trained by professors who themselves had become civil servants in 1794. (Baus 1994: 14).
The major change came at the beginning of the 19th century with the reorganization of German academia by Wilhelm von Humboldt. The reform, which later became an inspiration for reformers in many other countries, was rooted in the German Enlightenment movement laying its emphasis on Bildung--the idea of self-cultivation. The university was to preserve the tradition of humanistic knowledge and to play an important role in shaping German national identity. Moreover, the new concept of the university expressed the priority of "knowledge, which is still to be discovered" as put by Wilhelm von Humbold. (Turner 2001: 13). The scholars were given enormous freedom and autonomy in their work and the concept ignored any vocational aspect of university education with professional knowledge of graduates being a kind of by-product of years spent at the university.
In the second half of the 20th century, universities faced another kind of challenge. Demographic boom, economical development and social transformation created a huge demand for higher education. Old concepts of an elitist university could hardly cope with these pressures. In the 1960s and 1970s the system witnessed an enormous expansion, with an increasingly significant part of new entrants being women and students from lower classes. To accommodate these growing numbers of students and to allow wider access to higher education, the dual system was introduced in the 1970s with the creation of the Fachhochschulen (Universities of Applied Science). As the alternative to the university they were to provide shorter and more vocationally oriented courses in limited fields of study. The trend to stress the relevance of university education for the demands of the labor market and professional life has been firmly established since then.
The social status of women and their access to education began to change only by the end of 19th century. In 1886 they were allowed to sit the Abitur (secondary school final examinations) and at the beginning of the 20th century (in Prussia in 1908) they were allowed to enter university. At the beginning of the 1960s when the expansion of higher education started, women constituted no more than 24% (BMBF 2000) of the student population. Their number started to rise constantly, but they have not caught up with men, yet. (Fig.1).
[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]
Women's entry into the academic profession took even longer. Although there were no legal bars, the social norms kept women from pursuing academic careers. Women were allowed habilitation in Prussia in 1920 and the first woman obtained a Chair in 1923. (Baus 1994: 18-19). However, they were discriminated against in various ways, e.g. married women could not hold the civil servant position, which traditionally characterizes German professorship (Baus 1994: 13-22).
Expansion of higher education in the 1960s and 1970s offered chairs only to a few women, as the number of women pursuing doctorates and habilitations was traditionally very low. There were only 404 women compared to 2338 men among the new doctors in 1960 i.e. 14,7%, or even 8% (136) if we exclude medicine (2). Only a few women succeeded to be awarded habilitation--the traditional prerequisite for an academic career and a kind of rite de passage in academia. Within 50 years (1920-1970) only 456 women earned an habilitation (Boedeker, Meyer-Plath 1974). In comparison, a similar number of men were awarded habilitation every two years throughout 1960s. However, those admitted into the academic community by the virtue if habilitation did not get easily promoted to the senior positions, i.e. they were not given a Chair (Hampe, 1963). With the expansion of higher education, the traditional organization of academic hierarchy has started to change, challenging the Chair system and integrating junior staff into the decision-making process.
Until 1977 the absolute number of women professors increased from 93 in 1963 (0,8%) to 1414 (5,5%). Additionally, the status of some academic women (some of them non-habilitated) was somehow artificially upgraded to the status of university professors by integrating the pedagogical colleges into the university sector where women were in greater numbers (11% of female professors in pedagogical colleges vs. 4,9 % overall in 1977, Mohr 1987: 209).
Furthermore, since the mid 1970s and the end of the expansion phase the number of junior staff positions and professorships has remained stable and the career perspectives have inevitably deteriorated. The female junior staff, on the contrary, has been constantly increasing, filling the continually expanding sector of fix-term, part time and externally funded academic jobs.
In the 1990's we observed another expansion of the German academic labor market due to the incorporation of the former GDR academia, but which did not lead to a real opening of the sector. The increase in proportion of female staff in the same period is partially affected by this fact, as East German academia had a greater proportion of women especially at junior level. The increase in the women's share among professors is also linked to a generational shift as many professors appointed in the 1970s currently retire and their positions are left vacant. With the rise of the number of well-qualified women, stagnating numbers of men entering the sector and perhaps the effects of positive action, women as a group nowadays have better chances of becoming professors.
Despite all these positive changes the picture is still more or less the same--women are dropping out all the way long to the top rank positions in academia and their share decreases rapidly at higher levels, even if we take into account the cohort effect (i.e. women in academia having a younger age structure, as the number of female newcomers is growing much faster than the number of male students found at junior level Fig.2).
In fact, Germany has one of the lowest levels of female participation in higher education and on the academic labor market in Europe. Women make up only for 44,5% of the German students. Only one-third of the new doctor's degree awardees and 15,3 % of the new habilitation awardees are women. Merely 5,9% of the C4 professors and 9,8% of C3 professors--the top rank positions in German academia--are women (BLK 2000).
Women also rarely reach the top management positions, e.g. in 1998 only 11 out of 222 rectors were female (5,0%), similarly only 4 out of 75 presidents (5,3%) and 30 out of 277 chancellors (10,8%) were female (BLK 2000). These ratios are of special importance--the women tend to be absent in the debates shaping institutional policies and the system lacks new female role models challenging the status quo. Similarly, the ratio of women to men in all the important bodies in higher education politics is often unsatisfactory. The ratio of women to men at the Conference of Rectors and Presidents of Higher Education Institutions (Hochschulrektorenkonferenz) mirrors the ratio of female rectors and presidents to men holding these offices indicated above. In the Commission of Science Council there are 20 men and 7 women (26%). There are also 7 female Laender ministers responsible for higher education and science out of 16 (43%). The Federal Ministry of Education and Research is directed by a woman--Edelgard Bulmahn. The participation of women in other research grants providing institutions (e.g. German Research Society/DFG) is again disappointingly low. There were 6 women among 38 Senate members of the DFG (16%) in 1998, and the percentage of women among the peer reviewers (the essential gate--keepers) has reached only 7,7% in 2001 (50 out of 650) (3).
Structure of the higher education system
In 1998 there were 344 institutions of higher education, both public and private: 92 universities, 7 comprehensive universities, 6 pedagogical colleges, 16 theological colleges, 46 art colleges and 183 Fachhochschulen with about 1.800.000 students.
The sector of higher education in Germany can best be described as a dual system. On the one hand there are universities and equivalent institutions (1) being in charge of teaching and scientific research (particularly basic research) and the training of the next generation of academics, on the other hand there are the more vocationally oriented Fachhochschulen. What universities and equivalent institutions have in...
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