Toward Awareness Creation of Common Challenges Women are Facing in Academia: A Study from a German Perspective

Every day, women face plenty of challenges regarding their family, taking care of the seniors, equality, and appreciation at the workplace, etc. - usually with little outside support. While these challenges are not new, the awareness level towards these challenges is still low. This research aims to create awareness towards women's difficulties by studying the challenges women in research face at German universities. We also investigate how women in research handle their challenges and whether these challenges correlate to their place of birth. We investigate how these challenges differ between the computer science community and other STEM fields. To gain data, we conducted a survey with 200 women from technical universities in Germany. The results show that parenting and family planning are the most common challenges among women in research. Many women also describe problems dealing with men. Furthermore, women in computer science solved their problems in 34% of cases, others only in 23%. Even if help from others was the most frequently described solution (29%), strategies like a workaround (27%) or changing the workplace (11%) are common. We conclude from our study, that women in research still have many problems. These problems include finding an appropriate solution to a problem.