The academic „labor market“ in Austria
Michaela Glanz
2003/01/22
Handout:
The academic „labor market“ in Austria explaining women’s representation and careers in academia
by: Michaela Glanz
Betreuerin: Dr. Christine Zulehner
Introductory Notes
The topic of my master thesis must be seen as one very special aspect of a broader
discussion about higher education issues with special attention given to university’s efficiency
and market-orientation that takes place all over Europe. Among others the reform in academic
human resources at universities is a rather controversial issue. While those who took the
initiative to implement the socalled “Dienstrechtsreform” praised the creation of better
opportunities for younger, highly qulalified scientists, critics are still doubtfull about that and
are especially concerned about its consequences for academic careers of female faculty. As
the issue of gender-aspects in Austrian higher education up to now mainly took place on basis
of sociological research it seems to be rewarding to have a closer look at possible economic
explanations for the representation and careers of females within the academic profession at
Austrian universities.
Some remarks on the structure of the academic profession
Before going into detail, it seems necessary to give some general information about the
structure of the academic profession at Austrian universities.
According to the socalled “Beamtendienstrechtsgesetz” the category of academic
teaching personnel at Austrian universities inculdes university professors, university docents,
university assistants and Bundesleher/innen employed by public law and those emloyed on
contractual basis according to the “Vertragsbedienstetengesetz”. While university professors
and university docents by public law are tenured positions, the position of a university
assistant may be held either for a limited period of usually 4 years ( “befristetes
Dienstverhälntis”) or for a further period of 6 years - socalled provisional position (
“provisorisches Dienstverhältnis”) - or after that as a tenured position ( “definitives
Dienstverhältnis”). For those academic staff hired after 30th of September, 2001, employment
is only possible on contractual basis by privat law: For professors this implies that they may
be either on a tenured position or on a temporary position for the time of 7 years, while
assistants can only be employed for a limited period of 4 to 6 years. In principle there is no
possibility of prolongation of time of contract. Furthermore the new category of staff
scientists was created as a position for scientific collaborators with mainly research functions.
For each of the categories mentioned there exist different pay scales with up to 19 levels to be
initially placed on according to previous periods of service. It is necessary to keep both types
of regulations - by public law and by private law - in mind, as within the period of time to be
analyzed both apply to university personnel.
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The academic „labor market“ in Austria
Michaela Glanz
2003/01/22
The typical career pattern to be observed until the new regulations in 2001 will be that
of starting as an assistant for a limited period of 4 years and applying for promotion into a
provisorial position after that, when having aquired a doctorate meanwhile. Promotion into a
tenured assistant position takes place after 6 years if certain requirements in research and
teaching - not specified in detail by law - are fullfilled or extraordinary administrative work
has been done. If an assistant wants to obtain the position of a docent, he/she has to aquire the
venia docendi, also called habilitation. The habilitation - or a certificate comparable to it - is
also necessary if someone wants to apply for the position of a university professor in addition
to beeing involved in international resarch and other requirements to be specified in the job
advertisement. In principle employment or promotion is fixed by ministerial order after
beeing discussed within different decision making groups at university level.
Female academic staff at Austrian Universities
Development and Status quo - some figures
Before talking about the changing representation of females among academic personnel
at universities we should have a look at the overall development of academic staff numbers
during the past decades by having a look at Table 1.
Table 1: Development of absolute numbers of academic staff hired at Austrian Universities
academic
year
1975/76
1980/81
1985/86
1990/91
1995/96
2000/01
total numbers
6.851
7.467
8.743
10.841
13.738
14.808
males
5.993
6.481
7.298
8.565
10.082
10.262
growth rate
of males
8,14
12,61
17,36
17,71
1,79
females
858
986
1.445
2.276
3.656
4.546
growth rate
of females
14,92
46,55
57,51
60,63
24,34
Source: Statistik Austria: Hochschulstatistik 2000/01, Wien 2002.
We can easily see that the absolute number of academic staff hired at Austrian
universities in 2000/01 has more than doubled compared to 1975/76 so that on 1st of
December, 2001 nearly 15,000 persons do teach our students. And it seems that females could
take more advantage of this expansion than their male colleagues as at each of the observed
periods the female growth rate exceeds the male one. While the number of men among all
teaching staff only grew at a rate of 8,14 % from 1975/76 to 1980/81, females increased by
14,9% in order to reach an impressing growth rate of 60,63 % from 1990/91 to 1995/96
But having a closer look at the proportions of femals at certain ranks will surely correct
this first impression: Altough the representation of women in academia improved since the
mid-seventies, the situation today still can hardly be called satisfactory, as although the
proportion of females among all academic personnel in 2000/01 reached 30,7 %, compared to
12,5% in 1975/76, the more differentiated look at the different ranks shows, that the
proportion of female university professors - altough having more than doubled since the
beginning of the nineties - does not reach more than 7 %. In contrast to the low representation
at top of the academic staff hierarchy, the percentage of females among assistants is 27,4 %
and among 43,5 % of collaborators in teaching (comprising university teachers as well as
study assistants, demonstrators and tutors).
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The academic „labor market“ in Austria
Michaela Glanz
2003/01/22
Furthermore when looking at the distribution of female assistants and professors over
different disciplines, there is a rather high segregation: While at veterinary medicine 49,7 or
in jurisprudence 43,8 % of assistants are female in technical disciplines and natural science
the percentage falls below 20 %. Electrical engineering and information technology bringing
up the rear with only 2,3 %. When talking about female professors and their distribution over
disciplines the highest proportion of 14,9 % can be found at humane disciplines, while there
are no female professors at “Montanuniversität Leoben” and in electrical engineering and
information technology.
As one frequently mentioned explanation for the lower proportion of female academic
staff is the small number of potential candidates for the different positions, the next step of
aggregate data analysis will be to look at the numbers of students and graduates in addition.
Table 2: Proportions of females at universities, 1970-2001
Source: bm:bwk: Hochschulbericht 2002/Band 1. Wien, 2002. p. 97.
Similar to the development of academic staff proportions, also the number of female
students and graduates increased enormously, resulting in almost doubling the percentage of
female students admitted to university study for the first time from 1970 until 2001, whereby
most of the increase took place in the period between 1970 and 1975 and has to be attributed
to the abolition of tuition fees in 1972.
Directly comparing the percentage of female students and graduates to the positions on
the academic career ladder in each selected year as a cross section, we can see that there is no
lack of formally qualified females to start with their careers in academia, neither at the
beginning of the time taken into consideration nor today. The figures indicate, that at each
stage of a life in academia more women than man fail to reach the next step of qualification or
rank. Although there is an improvement of female participation in academia over time, the
general pattern of an enormous gender gap at higher ranks holds until today. These figures
suggest that there are gender-related differences that result in less females moving up the
academic career ladder compared to their male colleagues so that - although differences in
occupational choice also may be an explanation - speculations upon discriminatory aspects
may come into mind.
Similar results hold when looking at data about different levels within the category of
assistants in order to illustrate one of the hypothesis stated in empirical analysis, namely that
there are gender-differences in the promotion of assistants.
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The academic „labor market“ in Austria
Michaela Glanz
2003/01/22
Table 3: proportions of females and males among different ranks of univ. assistants
Univ. Doz
Univ.Ass. in def. DV
Univ.Ass. in prov. DV
Univ.Ass. in zeitl. befr. DV
% females
14,87
26,01
33,05
33,12
% males
85,13
73,99
66,95
66,88
Source: bm:bwk: Hochschulbericht 2002/ Band 2, Wien 2002. p. 113f.
Table 3 shows that although the proportion of female assistants only falls from 33,12 %
to 33,05 % when changing from a time-limited position to a provisional one, it falls to 26,01
% when beeing employed as a tenured assistant and only reaches 14,87 % among the rank of
university docents. So we can conclude that with higher ranks within the category of
university assistants the gender gap of representation widens significantly.
Theoretical framework - promotion in academia as a tournament?
Most of the literature dealing with promotion focuses on the socalled tournament-model,
orignally introduced by Lazear & Rosen (1981) and highlightens the incentive aspects of
promotions designed as tournament contests. Promotion tournaments are carachterized by
three central features:
1. It is uncertain who the winner of the contest will be.
2. The winner is selected in comparison to the other contestants, on basis of
relative performance.
3. The rewards are concentrated in the hands of the winner (financial rewards as
well as option value of taking a crack at the next promotion), while the losers
usually get nothing or only a minor prize.
Furthermore the design of the contest fosters that once the winner has been identified,
he/she may rest on his/her laurels and losers do not have as strong incentives to engage in
hard work. Promotion tournaments are contests in which a person’s ultimate compensation (or
rank) depends on his or her performance during the contest and relative to others competing
for the same prize, so that the winner may perform just a little better than the second best
competitor, but gets all regardless whether the performance in contest reflects his/her actual
productivity.
Applying tournament theory to the academic profession seems reasonable because of
the following arguments:
 The academic market in an internal labor market, where most of the hiring
occurs at the lowest level and most of promotions take place within the
department.
 Differences in ranks and salary cannot be entirely explained in terms of
differences in performance.
 Furthermore actual performance may not be observed immediately, therefore
an incentive scheme seems necessary to avoid shirking in the short run.
 Altough a major part of performance can be measured, there are still
components that cannot be measured or quantified.
 Ordinal rankings are less costly to be observed.
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The academic „labor market“ in Austria
Michaela Glanz
2003/01/22
Analyzing gender discrimination in hiring
Such direct comparisons of the gender compositions of the labor force and the preseletion pool of doctorate recipients done before is a rather naive method of analysis to handle
the question of whether there is gender neutral hiring in academia. For this a more
sophisticated method has to be applied to take into consinderation that while the pre-selection
pool is a flow measure, the actual academic personnel is a stock measure and that genderneutral hiring resulting in female representation among universities’ academic staff equal to
female proportions among qulified candidates needs time.
For this the following method was developed (Toutkoushian, 1999):
Taking the following notations:
D0, … DT ....... total number of faculty in years 0 to T
Mt ................. male faculty in year t
Ft ................... female faculty in year t
qt .................... proportion of males in the pre-selection pool
r ..................... proportion of faculty leaving academia, assumed to be constant over time
Then the expected number of male faculty each year, E(Mt), given hiring at random
from the pre-selection pool, is simply given by
E(Mt) = E (Mt-1)(1-r) + qt-1 [Dt - Dt-1 (1-r)]
resulting into that the expected number of females among academic staff is given by
E(Ft) = Dt - E(Mt)
or as a proportion:
E(Ft)/Dt
This proportion can be compared with the actual percentage of females among
academic personnel at univerisities in order to assess whether the gender composition of
faculty is consistent with gender-neutral hiring of faculty from the pre-selection pool.
The results of this can be seen in the following tables for analysis, assuming different
rates of attrition and different groups of female academic staff as a reference group. Altough
these simiulations cannot provide strong evidence, they can be seen as an illustration whether
gender discrimination in hiring of new academic staff my exist.
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The academic „labor market“ in Austria
Michaela Glanz
2003/01/22
Table 1 for analysis:
comparing proportions of female assistants to female graduates
academic
year
actual % of
females
1992/93
1993/94
1994/95
1995/96
1996/97
1997/98
1998/99
1999/00
2000/01
22,26
23,38
23,59
24,41
25,29
26,69
25,30
26,73
27,36
3 % of
attrition
23,60
23,81
24,36
23,88
25,06
25,50
28,26
25,30
27,69
assuming
5 % of
8 % of
attrition
attrition
24,02
24,64
24,23
24,87
24,78
25,39
24,32
24,97
25,47
26,08
25,91
26,53
28,66
29,26
25,81
26,57
28,14
28,82
10 % of
attrition
25,06
25,29
25,80
25,40
26,49
26,94
29,65
27,08
29,27
actual % of
female
graduates
44,36
44,28
44,95
44,82
45,51
47,53
50,02
49,64
51,74
Table 2 for analysis:
comparing proportions of female teaching staff (Prof+Ass) to female dr.graduates
academic
year
1991/92
1992/93
1993/94
1994/95
1995/96
1996/97
1997/98
1998/99
1999/00
2000/01
actual % of 3 % of
females
attrition
17,97
17,84
18,87
18,85
19,89
19,36
20,16
20,33
20,86
20,30
21,67
21,21
22,79
21,83
21,90
23,56
23,22
21,89
23,87
23,78
assuming
5 % of
8 % of
attrition
attrition
18,04
18,33
19,04
19,31
19,51
19,72
20,52
20,80
20,50
20,79
21,43
21,77
22,10
22,49
23,77
24,10
22,15
22,55
24,04
24,42
10 % of
attrition
18,53
19,50
19,86
20,99
20,98
22,00
22,75
24,31
22,81
24,68
actual % of
female dr.
27,82
26,23
29,49
29,65
32,16
34,55
34,01
34,71
36,33
37,80
Table 3 for analysis:
Table for analysis: comparing proportions of female assistants to female dr.graduates
academic
year
1991/92
1992/93
1993/94
1994/95
1995/96
1996/97
1997/98
1998/99
1999/00
2000/01
actual % of 3 % of
females
attrition
21,39
21,04
22,26
22,02
23,38
22,54
23,59
23,67
24,41
23,68
25,29
24,66
26,69
25,39
25,30
27,24
26,73
25,30
27,36
27,13
assuming
5 % of
8 % of
attrition
attrition
21,17
21,36
22,14
22,32
22,61
22,73
23,79
23,97
23,80
23,98
24,81
25,05
25,57
25,86
27,38
27,59
25,50
25,79
27,32
27,60
10 % of
attrition
21,49
22,44
22,80
24,09
24,11
25,20
26,05
27,73
25,98
27,79
actual % of
female dr.
27,82
26,23
29,49
29,65
32,16
34,55
34,01
34,71
36,33
37,80
Source: Statistik Austria: Hochschulstatistik 200/01, Wien, 2002.
bm:bwk: Hochschulbericht 2002 / Band 2, Wien, 2002. p. 255
own computations
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