Heather Hofmeister

Globalization, Uncertainty and Women’s Careers

Globalization, argue the contributors to this book, has remarkably accelerated social and economic change in modern societies. One such change is manifested in the world of work and careers. This book explores whether the forces of globalization affect the erosion of standard career patterns of mid-career men in twelve OECD countries. Overwhelming evidence against the ‘individualization of inequality’ thesis is provided – it is argued that equality remains largely stratified by factors such as occupational class and educational level, and in some countries has even grown over time. The contributors illustrate that globalization appears to have influenced the rise of ‘patchwork’ careers in countries where workers have been increasingly less protected by institutional configurations. These countries include Denmark, Mexico, The Netherlands, the UK and the US, as well as post-socialistic countries such as Hungary, Estonia and the Czech Republic. Interestingly, there is no evidence that men’s careers have become more erratic in Italy, Spain, Sweden or Germany. Nation-specific institutions, such as welfare regimes, education and training systems and employment relations remain key factors impacting on job mobility patterns. Using empirical evidence to demonstrate how different policy approaches impact the employment careers of individuals, this book will be invaluable to academics, students, researchers, practitioners and policymakers seeking to understand the effects of international social change on national contexts.

Work, family, and religious involvement for men and women

Do family formation and social establishment affect religious involvement in the same way for men and women, given increasing individualism and rapid changes in work and family roles? Using a random sample of adults from upstate New York (N = 1,006), our research builds on previous work in this area by using multiple measures of religious involvement, using multiple measures of individualism and beliefs about work and family roles, placing men and women in their work context, and looking at the relationships separately by gender. Men’s religious involvement is associated with marriage, children, and full-time employment, signaling social establishment and maturity. Women’s involvement is higher when there are school-aged children in the home, but it is also more intertwined with the salience of religion and with an assessment that religious institutions are a good fit with their values and lifestyles, including egalitarian views of gender. For men and women, views of religious authority and the role of religious institutions in the socialization of children are associated differently with religious involvement at different life stages. We call for further research to understand the gendered nature of religious involvement and the role of beliefs about work, family, and religion in explaining why individuals choose to be involved in religious institutions.

Late 20th-Century Persistence and Decline of the Female Homemaker in Germany and the United States

The article compares changes in West German and American womens mid-career job exits and re-entries and introduces an innovative event-history model to compare mobility across three decades using 1940s and 1950s birth cohorts from the German Life History Study and the US National Longitudinal Survey of Young Women. Processes by which transitions through parenthood and marriage impact womens labour market participation vary by country and cohort, evidence that changing gender relations, norms and institutions provide unique options and restrictions for womens family and career trajectories. Homemaking is in decline in both countries, but event-history models show that this decline is due to different life course dynamics in each country: womens job attachment has increased throughout the family cycle in the US, while German women still exit the labour market, but at motherhood rather than marriage, and for shorter durations. Employment interruptions have become more penalizing for women in both countries.

Breaking the Cycle – Wege aus der starren gesellschaftlichen Konstruktion von Arbeit und Geschlecht in Europa

„People are border-crossers who make daily transitions between two worlds – the world of work and the world of family” (Campbell Clark 2000: 748). Diese Feststellung von Campbell Clark hebt die Vereinbarkeitsproblematik von Beruf und Familie im Leben von Männern und Frauen hervor, die oft unbemerkt, aber unzählige Male im Alltag auftritt. Familie und Beruf sind die zentralen Lebensbereiche von Frauen und Männern in der heutigen europäischen Gesellschaft. Diese zwei Bereiche stehen in einer wechselseitigen, aber nicht gleichgewichtigen Beziehung. Im Folgenden wird diese Problematik detailliert aufgegriffen und mit zukunftsfähigen Handlungsempfehlungen verbunden. Wir beginnen mit einem kurzen historischen Überblick zu Familie und Beruf in Europa.

Some like Them Hot: How Germans Construct Male Attractiveness

This study investigates what makes a man attractive to a woman in Germany, using a sample of 691 German citizens aged 18 to 92, collected in 2006, randomly sampled from resident registration lists in four representative regions. We test the idea that attractiveness is socially constructed and create measures of attractiveness using agreements of respondents to 16 statements. The three dimensions that emerged were breadwinning ability, relationship skill, and physical attractiveness, which can overlap. We chose the three most common combinations: 19% of respondents considered only relationship skill as important, 25% valued relationship skill and physical attractiveness, and 31% valued all three. Binary logistic regression indicated that Germans differ on what they consider important based on gender, birth cohort, education, earnings, job status and religion, with the biggest predictor being gender. Men were more likely than women to expect that women want the man who “has it all.”

The idealization of the ‘new father’ and ‘reversed roles father’ in Germany

Over time, social expectations of fathers in Germany have changed, from biological siring to protection, to providing, and lately to nurturing of children (including childcare, emotional support, and education). We empirically model the contemporary German ideal of fathering using a sample of 691 German citizens from ages 18 to 92, selected from resident registration lists in 2006 in four economically typological regions: Northwest, urban city-state, East, and South. Two-thirds of respondents idealize fathering as both nurturing and breadwinning, and one-third idealize fathering only with nurturing. We analyze which social groups prioritize which dimensions based on gender, region, birth cohort, education level, partnership and parenthood status, and religion. Results suggest strong institutional and structural – especially East–West – effects on the social construction of fatherhood in Germany and a mismatch between the idealized father and chances men have to achieve it.

Warum verzichten wir auf 40% unserer Kreativen?

Wenige Frauen fangen mit dem Ingenieurstudium an und noch weniger beenden dieses. Der Beitrag geht auf die zwei Hauptaspekte dieses bedauernswerten Zustands ein. Er erlautert abschreckende Beispiele fur Biologismus und fur Androzentrismus. Solange wir keine masgeblichen Anderungen herbeifuhren, wird sich der beklagenswerte Zustand kaum andern.

Globalisierung, Flexibilisiemng und der Wandel von Lebensläufen in modernen Gesellschaften

Die Prozesse der Arbeitsmarktflexibilisierung sind heute sehr eng mit dem Phanomen der Globalisierung verbunden. Globalisierung ist dabei sicherlich kein neues Phanomen, aber die Intensitat und Reichweite grenzuberschreitender Interaktionsbeziehungen, seien es okonomische Transaktionen, informationelle und kulturelle Austauschprozesse oder internationale politische Abmachungen und Vertrage, scheinen seit der Mitte der 80er Jahre, insbesondere seit dem Ende des Ost-West-Gegensatzes, in den meisten Industrielandern schubartig zugenommen zu haben (siehe Grafik 1). Dieser Beitrag beschaftigt sich mit den Effekten dieser Ausweitung der gesellschaftlichen Beziehungen uber die Grenzen des Nationalstaates hinaus auf die Arbeitsmarktflexibilisierung und den Wandel individueller Lebenslaufe in verschiedenen modernen Gesellschaften. Er wendet sich der spezifischen Frage zu, wie sich die Mobilitatsprozesse von Mannern und Frauen in Europa und Nordamerika im Flexibilisierungs- und Globalisierungsprozess wandeln und berichtet uber ausgewahlte empirische Ergebnisse des an der Universitat Bamberg durchgefuhrten und von der VolkswagenStiftung finanzierten Projektes ‚GLOBALIFE — Lebensverlaufe im Globalisierungsprozess‘.