Elizabeth Rudd

Onto, Up, Off the Academic Faculty Ladder: The Gendered Effects of Family on Career Transitions for a Cohort of Social Science Ph.D.s

With event history analysis, we examine the impact of gender, marital status and spouse type, and parenting at key transition points in the early careers of more than 2,000 social science Ph.D. graduates. This analysis (a) uses data from recent Ph.D. graduates; (b) disentangles the effects of marriage and parenting; and (c) observes the effects of different marriage configurations. Results suggest that the negative impacts of motherhood and marriage on womens careers are diminishing, but that for men fatherhood and marriage are beneficial. Most importantly, marriage to a less-educated spouse is associated with significant career advantages for men; however, women do not realize similar benefits from this type of marriage.

Gendering unemployment in postsocialist Germany: ‘what I do is work, even if it's not paid’

Abstract This article uses feminist theories of the family to examine womens unemployment in the early years of German postsocialism. It is based on qualitative fieldwork, including 80 in-depth interviews, conducted in three cities in the formerly socialist region of Germany. In this article, three cases of couples coping with a wifes unemployment are analyzed in terms of micro-processes of negotiating work-family balance, redefining employment and domesticity, and reconstructing gendered identities. The central argument is that a couples stance on emerging market institutions shaped how they re-negotiated their gender division of labor during postsocialism.