The Timing of Motherhood While Earning a PhD in Engineering

In spite of tremendous efforts, women are still under-represented in the field of science. Post-graduate education and early tenure track employment are part of the academic career establish-ment in research and development during periods that usually overlap with family formation. Though women tend to leave science mainly after obtaining their PhD, and the timing of mother-hood plays a vital role in a successful research career, qualitative data on this life period are scarce. Our paper focuses on how the normative and institutional contexts shape female PhD engineering students’ family plans. The research was based on intersections of life course and risk and uncertainty theories. Using qualitative interviews we explored how contradicting social norms of childbearing cause tensions in postgraduate students’ lives, and how the different uncer-tainties and risks permeate young researchers’ decisions on early life events. We concluded that, despite the general pattern of delaying motherhood among higher educated women, these students struggle against this postponement, and they hardly have any good options to avoid risk stem-ming from uncertainties and from some characteris-tics of studying and working in engineering. Find-ings of this research may call the attention of stake-holders to possible intervention points.

Examination of Inequalities in Hungary by Microsimulation in Consistency with Macro Data

Effective decision making uses various databases including both micro and macro level datasets. In many cases it is a big challenge to ensure the consistency of the two levels. Different types of problems can occur and several methods can be used to solve them. The paper concentrates on the input alignment of the households’ income for microsimulation, which means refers to improving the elements of a micro data survey (EU-SILC) by using macro data from administrative sources. We use a combined micro-macro model called ECONS-TAX for this improvement. We also produced model projections until 2015 which is important because the official EU-SILC micro database will only be available in Hungary in the summer of 2017. The paper presents our estimations about the dynamics of income elements and the changes in income inequalities. Results show that the aligned data provides a different level of income inequality, but does not affect the direction of change from year to year. However, when we analyzed policy change, the use of aligned data caused larger differences both in income levels and in their dynamics.