Gender differences in educational behavior and educational success (BMBF project)

Joint Project

Prof. Dr. Steffen Hillmert, Meike Han, M.A. (Universität Tübingen, Institut für Soziologie)
Dr. Steffen Kröhnert, Stephan Sievert, M.A. (Berlin-Institut für Bevölkerung und Entwicklung)

Since German reunification, especially in the new, East German federal states a significant discrepancy between the formal educational degrees of men and women has arisen. This education gap is particularly pronounced in peripheral rural regions. To a lesser extent, the gender-specific educational inequality has also developed in the old, West German federal states, although here it has occurred more among migrants. The project intends to analyze the gender differences in educational behavior in an East-West German comparison with a specific focus on the population with a migrant background. The project’s regional approach is to allow for the identification of conditions that promote gender equality in educational success from which possibilities for measures to increase gender equality in education can be derived. This project will focus especially on investigating processes at the micro-level and the question of the role of individual and familial conditional factors as they relate to gender-specific education inequality. The interactions among individual or familial influencing factors, school composition effects, institutional conditions, and regional socio-economic factors in gender-specific education are to be examined. The project’s core is made up of regionalized, statistical multilevel analyses based on educational data supplemented with regional information. The joint project, funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), is being worked on together with Dr. Steffen Kröhnert and Stephan Sievert, M.A., from the Berlin Institute for Population and Development.