麻豆淫院

After completing their doctorates, many new Ph.D.s must ask themselves important questions about their careers and lives: Should I pursue an academic career? Should I look for a job in the private sector? And of course: How should I plan my family and parental leave?

A research team led by Christiane Gross, Chair of Quantitative Methods of Empirical Research at Julius Maximilian University of W眉rzburg (JMU), investigated how parental leave affects the income of highly educated parents. The researchers their findings in the Journal of Marriage and Family.

The team used a representative study conducted by the German Center for Higher Education Research and Science Studies (DZHW) across Germany as its data basis, involving over 5,000 doctoral graduates from all disciplines in the 2014 doctoral cohort. The study period covered the first seven years after completion of the doctorate. Here are the most important findings:

• Two-thirds of all respondents have at least one child. Of these, just under 80% take parental leave at least once.
• Women with doctorates take parental leave more often and for longer periods than men with doctorates.
• Only one in 50 mothers does not take parental leave; among fathers, the figure is one in three.
• Fathers usually take only short (one to two months) or medium-length (three to seven months) career breaks, while 56% of mothers take more than a year of parental leave.
• A longer absence of more than 12 months is associated with a loss of income for both mothers and fathers. However, women are affected by this significantly more often than men.

"The results suggest that the unequal use of parental leave between women and men is an important factor in the wage gap between them," says Gross. The findings also support labor market theories that suggest that taking parental leave can have a negative impact on career progression and income.