Teaching News

Maria Rose’s bachelor’s thesis awarded the Institute Prize for Theses 2025

The bachelor’s thesis examines the societal devaluation of female communication in the context of patriarchal power relations, using gossip as an example. Based on the observation that conversations among women are frequently labelled as trivial, insignificant or morally questionable, the thesis analyses these attributions as an expression of symbolic violence and gender-specific power relations.

Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic violence and the concept of ‘doing gender’, this study demonstrates how language, taste and communicative practices contribute to the reproduction of male dominance. Gossip is examined here as an ambivalent practice, both historically and socially: by tracing its conceptual development, the close link with femininity, triviality and social marginalisation is highlighted, which is reflected in the separation of the public and private spheres, the ambivalent assessment of female speech—ranging from devaluation to perceived threat—and in its function as both socially integrating and disciplining.

At the heart of the analysis lies the question of why conversation amongst women is, on the one hand, trivialised by the connotations associated with the label ‘gossip’ and, on the other, morally stigmatised and socially regulated. It becomes apparent that female communication practices appear not only as a site of symbolic subordination, but also as potentially subversive spaces for action, whose emancipatory potential, in Bourdieu’s sense, must be limited in order to maintain male dominance.

We offer our warmest congratulations!

Ellen Winkler’s Master’s thesis awarded the 2024 Departmental Prize for Theses

My Master’s thesis, “Socialisation, Achievement or Psychology – An Analysis of Atypical Career Aspirations”, examines the factors that influence male adolescents’ aspirations for gender-atypical careers at the end of lower secondary school. I use various theoretical approaches to derive hypotheses that take into account factors on three levels: socialisation, achievement and psychology. The hypotheses are tested using data from the National Education Panel (approx. 4,000 young people, Year 10, 2012). Using multinomial logistic regression, I analyse which factors are associated with male adolescents’ aspirations for occupations where at least 70% of the workforce are women. Over a third of the adolescents aspire to a male-dominated occupation, whilst just over 5% aspire to a female-dominated one. Socialisation factors prove to be scarcely relevant as influencing factors.

Performance-related factors, on the other hand, are somewhat more significant: higher mathematical ability reduces the likelihood of an atypical career aspiration, whilst an internship in a female-dominated profession increases it. The most pronounced effects are found at the psychological level. The aspiration towards an atypical profession becomes more likely for male adolescents if they have a stronger interest in social rather than practical-technical matters, attach less importance to economic aspects regarding career choice, and exhibit lower self-esteem. The results of my Master’s thesis therefore show that male career aspirations are strongly oriented towards traditional paths, and a deviation from this only becomes likely under conditions where other non-conforming factors are present.

We offer our warmest congratulations!

Joint bachelor’s thesis by Adrian Greiner and Matthias Kelsch awarded the 2022 Institute Prize for Theses

Adrian Greiner, Matthias Kelsch: “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? A quantitative empirical study of wealth inequalities linked to social background and their influencing factors”

In our bachelor’s thesis, we examine the extent to which wealth inequalities based on social background exist in Germany, the factors to which such inequalities may be attributed, and how they have developed over recent years.

Building on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of class, we begin by assuming that wealth inequalities in Germany exist at the expense of lower-class groups. Secondly, following Bourdieu, we hypothesise that the middle and upper classes utilise both family-based (inheritance and gifts, cohabitation) and education-related reproduction strategies (earned income, education, productive debt, self-employment) to secure wealth advantages for their offspring. Thirdly, based on the assumption of cumulative advantages, we assume that the upper class in particular has been able to expand its superior position in the distribution of wealth over time. We test these assumptions using data from the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) for the years 2002 to 2017. Our analyses reveal, on the one hand, that significant wealth inequalities exist in Germany, primarily favouring the middle and upper classes. On the other hand, we can show that the wealth disadvantages of the lower-class group in particular increased significantly between 2002 and 2017. Our findings also suggest that the upper social groups possess more wealth than the lower class because they have greater access to productive debt, inheritances and gifts, earned income and education. Self-employment and cohabitation, by contrast, did not prove to be relevant factors influencing wealth inequalities specific to social background.

The findings of our research thus highlight, on the one hand, the (growing) importance of class background in the accumulation of individual wealth. On the other hand, they suggest that – contrary to widespread assumptions – the solution to growing wealth inequality cannot lie solely in higher taxation of inheritances and gifts. Rather, it would be at least as important to take policy measures to counteract educational and income inequalities linked to social background in order to facilitate a more egalitarian distribution of wealth.

We offer our warmest congratulations!

Marieke Asendorf’s bachelor’s thesis awarded the 2021 Departmental Prize for Theses

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Image: Marieke Asendorf

We are delighted that this year’s prize for the best bachelor’s thesis has been awarded to Marieke Asendorf, who wrote her thesis on ‘Spatial Differences in the Gender Pay Gap in Eastern Germany’ within the Methods of Empirical Social Research and Social Structure Analysis research group. A brief summary of the bachelor’s thesis can be found herepdf, 107 kb · de. We offer our warmest congratulations!