Attitudes toward Diversity, Objectivity and Meritocracy in Science (ADOMiS): Multiple barriers to academic excellence (2023 – now)

Among researchers, womxn, racialized minorities, working class people, people with minoritized sexualities and people with disabilities remain numerically underrepresented; this is exacerbated with increasing levels of seniority. The structural exclusion of diverse researchers from knowledge production contributes to one-sided knowledge from privileged perspectives, which in turn perpetuates and solidifies their marginalization. In this project, I survey doctoral students, mid-level faculty and professors at different universities about their retrospective and prospective careers. Attitudes towards diversity, objectivity and meritocracy in science prevalent in their immediate environment form the normative context, in which unequal career development and career planning are embedded. Experiences of discrimination, mental health and the internalized attitudes of marginalized researchers themselves (e.g., internalized stigma, negative self-image) are taken into account as underlying psychological mechanisms. The project is funded by the Berlin University Alliance.

Freedom of speech on campus: A pre-registered adversarial collaboration (2021 – now)

A recent study, which claims to have found evidence for widespread support for conformity pressure and self-censorship in academia and interpreted this as an attack on freedom of speech and free knowledge production. The study has been widely picked up by German media and heavily criticized for its conceptual and methodological shortcomings from within the scientific community [1,2,3]. The authors of the original study have suggested a joint pre-registered, empirical research project with a group of sceptics, in the form of an ‘adversarial collaboration’ . Karsten Schubert and I, two of the four sceptics [3, 4], argue that the sanctioning of bigoted speech at universities benefits the quality of knowledge production by ensuring the participation of diverse researchers.

Gender and sexual diversity in Germany: civic participation and social inclusion (Gesmin) (2020 – 2023)

A Federal Ministry of Education and Research-funded project aiming at improving the data infrastructure on LGBTQI* people in Germany lead by myself and co-PI Simon Kühne. The team further consists of our PhD students Zaza Zindel and David Kasprowski. I lead the work package concerned with the data analysis and outreach of the project, Simon Kühne leads the work package of data collection, harmonization and weighting.

Supplementing a boost-sample of lesbian, gay and bisexual households to the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP-LGB) (2019-2020)

In 2019, I was brought on to this project as postdoc with my expertise on collecting quality survey data among sexual minority populations and my substantive expertise in the field. The project, led by Martin Kroh and David Richter, aimed at recruiting LGB households into the German Socio-Economic Panel Study – the largest long-running panel data project, which is representative of the population in Germany. More information on the final product here.

Unions in Context: Lesbian and gay couples and families in the Netherlands (UNICON) (2015-2017)

In the UNICON project, I collected web-based, representative survey data among same- and different-sex unions and families in the Netherlands. The sample was drawn from the Dutch population registers in 20 municipalities. These are the only data of its kind as they are not biased by non-probability recruitment strategies and contain a large enough sample to allow for statistical comparisons between the union types. More information on the project website. Data access here.