Why women leave academia: A longitudinal study of the leaky pipeline in German sociology

Abstract The metaphor of a “leaky pipeline” is often used to describe the disproportionate loss of women at successive stages throughout academic careers, yet systematic longitudinal evidence on actual academic attrition remains limited. This study fills this gap by employing an original longitudinal panel design tracking nearly the entire population of sociologists in Germany from 1980 to 2022. Applying Cox regression models to career histories, the analysis examines gender differences among sociologists who exited academia since 2013. The within-gender findings show that women are more likely to leave academia during the pre-doctoral stage and face a higher risk of leaving academia when they have children—patterns not observed among men. Importantly, the between-gender findings reveal that women with comparable scientific capital to men face a 35% higher risk of leaving academia, a disparity that cannot be explained by differences in parenthood, career stage, productivity, or academic recognition.