Pierre Bataille
email: pierre.bataille@unil.ch

Nicky Le Feuvre

Sabine Kradolfer

Should I stay or should I go ? The eects of precariousness on the gendered career aspirations of postdocs in Switzerland

In this article, we propose to discuss the assumption that men are more likely to undertake and succeed in an academic career because the requirements of professional success in this occupation are compatible with normative gender assumptions, particularly that of fullling a male breadwinner or main household earner role, implying reduced domestic and care commitments. Switzerland oers a particularly interesting case for this study, because of the combination of the specic structure of academic careers, the characteristics of the non-academic labour market and the dominant gender regime. We will show that, in this particular context, the aspirations of postdocs to remain in academic employment or to look for non-academic jobs are directly related to their position within the domestic division of labour and to their personal and family circumstances. However, this does not necessarily lead to a clear-cut divide between work-committed men, who "succeed" (and stay), and care-committed women who "fail" to make it up the academic career ladder (and leave). Our results suggest that the situation is more complex and requires a subtle distinction between dierent ideal-types of post-doctoral experiences that do not always cut neatly across gender lines.

Introduction

Much recent research on the academic profession from a gender perspective has been framed around the dual notions of the glass ceiling and the leaky pipeline. The later metaphor has been widely used in the literature on gender and academic careers to suggest that : women are more likely than men to leave science at multiple time points from the beginning of college through academic tenure (Miller and Wai, 2015 : 1). The leaky pipeline approach moves beyond analysis of inequalities in terms of academic career paths, productivity or gendered specialisms, in order to focus on the processes of inclusion / exclusion within a particular occupation or institution. Building on a previous tradition of looking at the revolving 1 University of Lausanne, NCCR LIVES, Switzerland door into and out of academic jobs (Tancred and Hook Czarnocki, 1998), scholars from diverse elds have proposed how specic factors such as cognitive abilities, discrimination, and interests can explain these gender dierences in opting out (Miller and Wai, 2015 : 1).

Many explanations of the specic diculties that women may face in academia focus on work-life balance issues [START_REF] Feuvre | Femmes, genre et sciences : du sexisme moderne ?[END_REF]. On the one hand, research focusing on the organisation of academic work has dened universities and research centres as particularly greedy institutions (Coser, 1974 ;Currie et al., 2000), which are relatively insensitive to the potential familycare and domestic commitments of their research sta. According to this perspective, the androcentric character of academic organisations and a normative model of science as requiring total commitment (Case and Richley, 2013 : 329) are the main organisational factors that are said to keep women (and the minority of men with caring responsibilities) from reaching the pinnacle of the academic hierarchy (Beaufa¸s and Krais, 2005). This marginalisation often implies Preprint version 2 European Educational Research Journal 16 (2-3), pp.313-331 diculties in accumulating the assets needed to obtain a tenured position, based on what some authors have called a Mathilda eect (Rossiter, 1993), whereby minor dierences in commitment or research productivity at strategic points at the beginning of the academic path translate into signicant gender dierences in terms of nal career outcomes (Fassa and Kradolfer, 2010).

Other research has focused more on the subjective experiences of women in the academy and has stressed the diculties they face in managing the potential cognitive dissonance between the high demands of an academic job and the emotional commitment to family members, including partners and children (del Río Carral and Fusulier, 2013). Some scholars have suggested that it's because women are more likely than men to aspire to a form of dual or combined commitment to their families and their jobs that they are disadvantaged in the highly competitive academic labour market [START_REF]Chercheuses entre deux passions[END_REF]. This hypothesis is underpinned by another strong assumption : That men are more likely to undertake and succeed in an academic career because the requirements of professional success in this occupation are compatible with the normative gender assumptions associated with fullling the role of male breadwinner or main household earner.

From this brief summary of the literature we can see that the leaky pipeline metaphor is usually based on at least three implicit assumptions. Firstly, that the exit of PhD holders from the academy is potentially to their disadvantage (i.e. stayers) have the opportunity to progress to the top of the academic employment hierarchy, whereas the leavers are deprived of such career opportunities and are ultimately disadvantaged in terms of pay, recognition and job satisfaction).

Secondly, that the potential for achieving a satisfactory level of work-life balance is higher in non-academic jobs than within the higher education and research sector. Finally, that the spill-over eects of academic employment on personal life and family congurations (and vice versa) will have a greater impact on the occupational aspirations and outcomes of women than on those of men.

In this article, we propose to discuss and question these assumptions using the narratives of male and female postdocs in Switzerland. Our analysis is based on secondary statistical data and on biographical interviews with a selection of men and women who have occupied a post-doctoral position in a particular Swiss university at some point in their career and who have since left the academy.

In the following sections we will study the leaky pipeline phenomenon in the light of several characteristics of the Swiss context, notably the academic career structure, the main features of the non-academic labour market and the dominant gender regime. We will then present an analysis of the postdocs' aspirations regarding pay and working conditions. Finally, we will analyse in more depth the experiences of the so-called leavers, to identify the circumstances and experiences that led former postdocs to quit their academic jobs, in order to determine the role of work-life balance issues and of gender role assignations in these processes.

The "Leaky Pipeline" in Historical and Comparative Perspective Towards a de-standardisation of the traditional academic career path Given the massive over-representation of men at the top of the academic hierarchy across the globe, it is pretty safe to conclude that this occupation is still a male bastion, despite increases in women's share of professorships in many national contexts in recent years (European Commission, 2015 ;OECD, 2015). It's also relatively clear that, in a wide range of countries, employment conditions for researchers in academic institutions have evolved considerably over the past decades, notably through the unprecedented development of part-time and xed-term contracts [START_REF] Ylijoki | Future orientations in episodic labour: Short-term academics as a case in point[END_REF]Murgia and Poggio, 2014). These changes to the terms on which academics are recruited has led some authors to announce the emergence of a "post-Fordist/precarious university" (Casas-Cortés and Cobarrubias, 2007 : 112), where xedterm contracts and "episodic employment" [START_REF] Ylijoki | Future orientations in episodic labour: Short-term academics as a case in point[END_REF] have replaced the more predictable and stable academic career paths of the (sometimes overromanticised) past.

However, in their overview of the academic profession in comparative perspective, Musselin and Enders note that academic careers have always been based on a combination of exible and stable positions.

Even in the past, in most national contexts they began with a period of "apprenticeship and xedterm positions" (Enders and Musselin, 2008 : 134), before selected individuals were admitted to the second stage of "permanent positions", usually on the basis of satisfying given criteria for measuring professional performance or "excellence" (Enders and Musselin, 2008 : 134). Although the frequency of the rst to Preprint version second stage transition varied signicantly from one country to another (e.g. in terms of the expected duration of the rst stage, or the criteria for access to the second stage), it was nevertheless possible to identify a common "two-stage pattern" of academic careers across dierent national contexts (Enders and Musselin, 2008 : 134). However, some authors suggest that an erosion of this two-stage career pattern is currently underway in many countries. Through the widespread adoption of new competitive research funding procedures and individualised performance evaluation criteria (Enders, 2001 ;Ferlie et al., 2008 ;Schultheis et al., 2008), it would appear that : "the career based on a two-stage pattern is no longer the only one available within the academic profession" in Western universities (Enders and Musselin, 2008 : 134).

The relationship between these changes to academic career structures and the dissemination of so-called new public management principles is open to debate, as is the degree to which the two-stage academic career model has been universally eroded. In some countries :

"the proportion of traditional permanent positions has tended to diminish, whereas the number of non-tenure track positions has increased" (Enders and Musselin, 2008 : 134). This is the case in the US, where the proportion of the academic labour force engaged on xed-term contracts has increased from 43% in 197543% in to 64% in 200343% in (Ehrenberg, 2006)). Likewise, in the UK, it has been estimated that by the end of the 1990s, over 50 per cent of academic sta were employed on xedterm contracts (Bryson and Barnes, 2000). In Finland, the number of contract researchers increased almost 2.5-fold between 1994and 2004(from 2205in 1994to 5106 in 2004, see Ylijoki, 2010)).

Elsewhere, notably in countries where academics are still employed as civil servants, the erosion of the two-stage model has been less spectacular. In France, for example, the majority of those who "survive" the years of intense competition that follow the public defence of their PhD can expect to progress relatively quickly onto a permanent tenured position, rst as Senior Lecturer (in less than 5 years after the PhD), then as full professor (within 12 years).

The internal structure of the French academic labour market has thus not changed signicantly over the past 25 years (Bideault andRossi, 2013, 2014 ;MENSR, 2014) Despite variety in the speed and extent of these changes, it has been argued that "the growing external constraints and demands have shaped the ideals, work conditions and practices into a similar mould across all university settings, creating common tensions and challenges in academic work" (Ylijoki, 2010 : 368). In national contexts where such changes has been particularly strong, one can observe that "xedterm sta no longer form a marginal or exceptional phenomenon within academia, but rather the most common and continuously growing group of the personnel" (Ylijoki, 2010 : 368-369). Taking account of these evolutions in a large number of national academic labour markets, we argue that this trend towards the de-standardisation of academic career paths may make the "leaky pipeline" less of a feminine phenomenon, since some men may abandon any plans for an academic career, simply because these entry conditions to this occupation are no longer compatible with a normative, "breadwinner" model of masculinity.

The Swiss academic labour market : A growing "post-doc bubble" Due to the structure of academic careers, the characteristics of the non-academic labour market and the dominant gender regime, Switzerland oers a particularly interesting case for analysing the implications of the erosion of the two-stage career model for the gendered characteristics of exits from the academic career path. The Swiss university system is based on the "Humboldt" model of organisation, imported from Germany [START_REF] Kopp | Le modèle universitaire suisse[END_REF]. In line with this model, Swiss universities were traditionally organised around disciplinary faculties and Institutes (Lehrstuhl ) chaired by a single full professor. Within this system, academic personnel were traditionally divided into two distinct categories. At the top of the academic hierarchy were the full professors or "chairs", i.e academics who are employed on a permanent (tenured) and usually full-time basis, to teach, carry out research and to manage the daily running of their Institute. At the relatively lower stages of the academic hierarchy stand the Mittelbau (or corps intermédiaire in French) i.e. PhD students hired as assistants, postdocs or junior academics, who are also expected to teach and do research, but who are recruited on temporary, Preprint version usually part-time, xed-term contracts, and who work under the authority and leadership of a full professor or "chair" (Musselin, 2009 : 23). In order to progress to a permanent position, members of the upper Mittelbau had to wait sometimes for a very long time for a permanent position to become available, usually through the retirement or untimely death of their immediate hierarchical superior (Schultheis 2000). The (temporary) competitive funding opportunities provided by the SNSF and other foundations or institutions have undoubtedly increased the number of PhDs and Mittelbau who are able to undertake the kind of research that will enable them to apply for a professorship at some (distant) point in the future.

However, since the number of permanent positions within Swiss universities has remained relatively stable over time (cf. Figure 1), the pro-active support of young academics has led to the emergence of a large PhD and postdoc "bubble" [START_REF] Theodosiou | The rise of the professional master's degree: the answer to the postdoc/PhD bubble[END_REF].

The internal structure of the Swiss academic labour market shows that the number and relative weight of the Mittelbau (i.e.

"Assistants & Scientic

Collaborators" and "Other Teachers") increased considerably over the period under study. Growth was particularly rapid for the rst category, where the chances of being engaged on a xed-term contract are higher than in any other case. This group, which includes the doctoral students employed as teaching assistants and postdocs, represented almost half of the academic population in Swiss universities in 2014, as against 40% in 1980. This increase is partly due to the fact that the number of (funded) PhD positions has doubled since 1990 (SERI, 2014 : 32). However, the number of xed-term postdoc positions has also increased, to approximately 8000 in 2011 (SERI, 2014 : 25). Over the same period, the more stable category of the Mittelbau (other teachers) decreased by 5%, as did the proportion of full professors. The academic career structure has thus become increasingly "bottom heavy" over time : in 1980 there were 4 (temporary) assistantships or scientic collaborator positions for every full professorship. By 2014, this gure had doubled (1 to 8). These changes suggest that competition for a permanent professorial position has intensied over the past 25 years. This is compounded by the undeniable attractiveness of Swiss universities for foreign academics, particularly those from the neighbouring countries of France, Germany and Italy. At present, over 45% of full professorships in Switzerland are held by foreigners [START_REF] Goastellec | The Internationalization of academic markets, careers and profession[END_REF]. For this reason, the country provides a particularly interesting case study for our analysis of the eects of the de-standardisation and increasingly competitive character of the academic labour market on the gendered career and family-care aspirations of young researchers. Women now represent around 20% of full professors in Switzerland (Fig. 2), but with variations according to disciplinary eld (Fassa et Kradolfer, 2010).

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Preprint version Research questions and data "Leavers" and "Stayers" : The Complexity of the Leaky Pipeline in the Swiss Context Table 1 presents the results of a survey among young academics (mostly post-docs) engaged in one of the Swiss universities about their intention to pursue (or not) an academic career.

Two main ndings appear particularly interesting here. First of all, the Swiss postdocs are less likely than their foreign counterparts to envisage an academic career in the future. They are 11% more likely to declare that they probably won't pursue an academic career and 4% more likely to state that they denitely don't want to undertake an academic career. Secondly, amongst the foreign (i.e. non-Swiss) postdocs, men are more likely to aspire to a future academic career than women : 52% of the foreign male postdocs declare that they denitely intend to follow an academic career, as against only 39% of their female counterparts (-13%). Amongst the Swiss postdocs, however, the gender dierence is remarkably smaller (-3%). In other words, Swiss men do not seem to be signicantly more attracted to an academic career than their female colleagues.

As mentioned previously, Swiss women are more likely to be assigned to family-care tasks, which are rarely shared or externalised under the dominant gender regime, where most men are assigned to the "main breadwinner" role (Giraud and Lucas, 2013). This unequal share of domestic labour has often been used to explain why women fail to reach stable professorial positions in Swiss academic institutions (Fassa and Kradolfer, 2010). However, we would argue that the recent changes to the academic career path that we have outlined above may explain why Swiss men are today no more likely than their female compatriots to aspire to an academic career.

In the next sub-section, we will introduce life history and biographical data to illustrate a specically male "up or out" pattern of exit from the academy.

Our data suggest that, compared to the alternative opportunities available to male PhDs on the Swiss labour market, the uncertainty surrounding the eventual outcome of a succession of xed-term postdoc positions may make the perspective of an academic career rather unattractive to some men, particularly if they aspire to rapidly fullling a normative "main (male) breadwinner" role, This suggests that those men who believe that they do not have the academic record (or support networks) required to reach a stable academic position within a reasonable length of time (e.g. up to 5 years after the PhD) will start looking for more stable and well-paid jobs, either in industry or in the Swiss administration. Formally, they are "leavers", but their pathway out of the academy is very dierent to the one followed by those men (and women) who are less preoccupied with conformity or accountability to gender norms (Zinn and Le Feuvre 2013) and by those women who are faced with the imperative to "reconcile" their work and family lives [START_REF] Lapeyre | Concilier l'inconciliable ? Le rapport des femmes à la notion de `conciliation travail-famille' dans les professions libérales en France[END_REF].

Data and Methodology

The analysis that we will present in the following We selected our interviewees in order to cover a diverse range of the postdoc population, with regard to their sex, their disciplinary eld and the position they occupied at the time of the interview. The only thing that we didn't control for during the interview recruitment drive was nationality. However, reecting the unequal levels of internationalisation among the dierent academic disciplines, the SSH postdocs we interviewed are more likely to be Swiss, whereas LS postdocs are more likely to have been internationally recruited (see Table 2).

The (semi-structured) interviews were carried out from a life history or biographical perspective. We invited the interviewees to reconstruct their academic, employment and family trajectories, in order to better understand their vocational aspirations and choices, their expectations and their representation of an academic career. Because our main focus was the analysis of gender inequalities at the early stages of the academic career, we also asked questions about their personal experiences of gender relations at work, and about their vision of work-life balance now and in the future.

Three ways of leaving the academic career : How gender shapes the "leaky pipeline"

In the following sub-sections, we will use biographi- Even with these reduced hours, she found her workload too heavy to handle with, as she said, her "two children and full-time husband". She nally decided to quit this new position after just a few months. At the time of the interview, Jennifer was registered as unemployed,

and was thinking about training to become a Taï-Chi instructor. She is really enthusiastic about this potential move : "I've been practising Taï-chi for years ;

I had never seen this activity from a professional point view ; this was just something I really enjoyed doing".

In both of these cases, it is interesting to note that "work-life balance" issues feature as central In some cases (Jennifer), it was understood that any overtime would be paid, although this was clearly not always the case. Both interviewees suggest that they would have been willing to continue working in the academy, albeit in "research support services" rather than in a professorial capacity, had the opportunity to better "accommodate" their family and domestic commitments been available. The jobs they envisage for the future oer surprisingly similar characteristics to the ones they have held for many years at our target university, but they do not involve so much ambiguity (and associated tricky negotiations) around the level of availability and performance that should / could be expected from part-time workers on xedterm contracts.

As we will see in the following sub-section, the fact that academic institutions expect more than they are willing to recognise from their postdocs is also a recurrent theme in the interviews carried out with those male "leavers" who were also living in quite conventional family arrangements.

A "male breadwinner" account of leaving the academy : "up or out" around issues of recognition and reward

The narratives of men who "leave" the academic labour market are often very dierent from those of their female counterparts. The two men we will He says that his current job provides him with a "better salary" and, above all, "more stability". This is important because Tobias is the main earner in his household ; his partner works as a self-employed designer, with an irregular income.

It is interesting to note that work-life balance issues are mentioned in both of these interviews, but they are addressed from a very dierent perspective from the one developed by Maria and Jennifer. For example, Miguel believes that one of the main disadvantages of being an academic is the fact that work tends to "spill over" to other life spheres. However, unlike his female counterparts, Miguel is not concerned with the work-life balance implications of this overlap, but rather with issues of symbolic recognition and material reward. He believes that academic institutions expect people to work more than their ocial employment contract requires, whilst being unable to provide the necessary retributions to ensure lasting commitment and loyalty from their sta. Indeed, neither Miguel nor Tobias have any problem with the idea of working long hours ; both of them agree that "being exible" is vital to success in any eld. What really matters to them is not how they will manage their family lives in conjunction to their "elastic" (i.e. innitely extendable) working hours (this theme rarely comes up in the course of the interviews, except in reference to their partners), but rather how they will meet the normative expectations associated with universityeducated men in the Swiss context. Their main concern is to avoid accumulating a series of (relatively) poorly paid, xed-term academic contracts, with no guarantee of ever reaching a permanent academic position. In this case, the male interviewees (projected) role as "main breadwinner" played a major role in rendering the academic career path ultimately unattractive, in comparison to the alternative career opportunities on oer in the relatively buoyant Swiss labour market. On the very rare occasions when "work life balance" issues were mentioned by this category of male "leavers", they referred exclusively to the personal leisure activities that they had had been able to take up again, once they had been relieved of the pressures and uncertainties associated with the academic career track.

It could be argued that, particularly when they are involved in family congurations that are in conformity with the dominant Swiss gender regime, men and women "leavers" identify the same features of academic employment as the main source of their discontent : not only are universities seen as "greedy" institutions, they are also seen as being increasingly and structurally "ungrateful" to those in the early stages of an academic career. However, this shared diagnosis does not mean that men and women leave the academic career track for the same reasons. With some risk of over-simplication, we could say that the women leavers we interviewed, who were married, with children and living in households where they were expected to bear the brunt of domestic labour, tend to leave the academy in order to escape from the "greediness" of the institution. They moved into jobs where the amount of time they are expected to invest in their work was equivalent to their ocial working hours, with little regard for the stability, prestige or career prospects associated with their alternative occupational choices. In contrast, the male leavers we interviewed, who were also married and living in households where they were expected to conform to the normative masculine gure of the main (or sole) breadwinner, tended to leave the academy in search of "gratitude" (in the form of symbolic recognition and material rewards), with no concern for reducing the amount of time commitment or exible availability they had previously shown to their academic employer.

A "gender egalitarian" account of leaving the academy : when the price of staying is just too high

Although we don't intend to develop this idealtype in as much detail as the previous ones, it is interesting to mention that the decision to leave the academic career track doesn't only concern men and women who are living (or aspiring to live) according

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to dominant Swiss gender regime. We also have the example of one male postdoc who rejects the idea of pursuing an academic career precisely because this would imply the need for him to adopt a typically "male breadwinner" form of investment in his career, to the detriment of his active involvement in his or distant, this requirement also rests on a particular vision of the "ideal academic" that he nds is hard to identify with : "People are not trees that one can transplant from one place to another too often, he says. They have friends, family, or other ties (...) to the place where they live". He refuses the idea of leaving his partner and stepchildren behind to satisfy this "sociologically unrealistic" demand to be more or less permanently on the move, whilst also stressing that taking them with him would require his partner to "sacrice" her own career prospects, which he wouldn't nd ethically acceptable in the rst place, but which would also be totally unreasonable, given the "pie in the sky" chances of him ever getting a permanent academic job in Switzerland anyway.

Conclusion

In this article, we have attempted to approach the "leaky pipeline" question from a new angle. We argue that the erosion of the traditional academic is not the case that this leads to a clear divide between work-committed men who stay and "succeed" in the academy and care-committed women who leave and "leak" (cf. [START_REF] Glass | What's So Special About STEM ? A Comparaison of Women's Retention in STEM and Professional Occupations[END_REF].

Our research shows that men may decide to leave the academic career path during their postdoc phase for contrasting very reasons. On the one hand, we have identied the case of those men who are strongly committed to a traditional "main breadwinner" model of masculinity. As illustrated here by the cases of Miguel and Tobias, they adhere to a very clear "up or out" logic of behaviour. When faced with the impossibility of achieving a relatively stable and comfortably paid position within an "acceptable" period of time after their PhD submission, this rst group of men will leave the academy in search of more rewarding career opportunities in other elds, without any consideration of the implications of this decision for their investment in their home and family life. They may occasionally return to academic jobs in the future, but only if they are stable and well paid enough to support the "modied male breadwinner" model of family life that they have become accustomed to.

A second type of male "leavers" shares the aspirations and practices with many of the female postdocs we interviewed. As in the case of Simon, they are not without ambition and commitment to their jobs, but they believe that the pressures that now weigh on young researchers, notably in terms of academic productivity and international mobility, are Preprint version not compatible with a balanced and healthy personal life. Just like some of their female counterparts, they "drop out" of the academic career not because they lack ambition and drive, but simply because they believe that the potential returns on the "sacrices" they are expected to make to the academic career (Currie et al, 2000) are too costly for their own health or for the well-being of their loved-ones. Unlike the rst group of men, the family aspirations and practices of this second type of male "leavers" tend to be more egalitarian, with as much consideration being given to the professional success and material comfort of the partner as to the postdocs' own career advancement.

These egalitarian objectives are generally seen as more dicult to reach within academic institutions than in other sectors of the labour market [START_REF] Glass | What's So Special About STEM ? A Comparaison of Women's Retention in STEM and Professional Occupations[END_REF].

Finally, we have been able to identify a third group of leavers, composed exclusively of women who by choice or circumstance adhere to a relatively normative model of femininity. In fact, here it would probably be more appropriate to talk about "stayers" than "leavers", although, as in the case of Maria and Jennifer, they may end up leaving academic employment in the end. These are women, usually living with men who have already reached "main breadwinner" status, who are able to accept a series of precarious, usually part-time postdocs positions that are organised in such a way as to preclude any progression onto full professorial status. Contrary to the rst group of male "leavers", these women adopt a "wait and see" attitude to their academic career. Here, we would seem to have the makings of a new (highly feminised) "academic proletariat", which has been able to develop quite considerably in recent years, precisely because of its conformity to the normative "gender scripts" (Le [START_REF] Feuvre | Les 'scripts sexués' de carrière dans les professions juridiques en France[END_REF] or "master status" (Krüger and Levy, 2001) that continue to inuence all aspects of Swiss society.

We therefore argue that the gender signicance of the "leaky pipeline" is potentially diverse and even contradictory. Whilst it is important to measure the relative chances of men and women to become academic "stayers" or "leavers", the implications of these attrition rates for their future progression to the most prestigious positions in the academic hierarchy are potentially diverse. More attention needs to be paid to the socio-economic environment into which the postdoc pipeline may leak. We suggest that the nal destination of male and female leavers may not necessarily be less attractive or rewarding then the uncertainty and precariousness they currently face within the increasingly "greedy" and structurally "ungrateful" or unrewarding higher education and research institutions.

Notes 1. All the names cited here are ctitious. 2. http ://www.bfs.admin.ch/b fs/portal/fr/index/regionen/ the-matische_karten/gleichs tellungsatlas/vereinbarkeit _von_familie_und_erwerb sarbeit/traditionelles_buerg erliches_modell.html 3. One must note that such masculine type isn't typically Swiss. For instance, among French "grandes ecoles" graduates, one can also found men who prefer becoming secondary teacher than academic in order to preserve their life quality [START_REF] Bataille | Des cheminements sur la voie royale[202F?[END_REF]. Temporalités. Revue de sciences sociales et humaines, 18. Preprint version

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  , although the duration of the rst career stage has undoubtedly lengthened considerably. However, there are only limited opportunities for funding postdocs via a succession of xed-term contracts within the same institution. According to data from the Ministry of Higher Education and Research, 19.8% of academics were engaged on xed term contracts in 1992, as against 23.6% in 2012 (MENSR, 2014). These xed-term contracts mostly concern funded PhD students and early postdocs (Attachés temporaires d'enseignement et de recherche -ATER) and not people who are more advanced along the academic career path.

  This so-called Humboldtian organisational model is associated with what some researchers have termed a "survivor career pattern" (Enders and Musselin, 2008 : 134135) : To reach a permanent position, intermediate level academics had to nd the means to survive this long period of precariousness and dependency on their professor and had to accept the constant competition with their peers in the Mittelbau for the opportunity to move onto a permanent professorial position. As Schultheis (2000) has argued, at the end of the 19 th century, the availability of inherited wealth (or even the nancial support of a working wife) was the condition for maintaining what Durkheim had already referred to as the "academic proletariat" of the German university system. In a context of rapid expansion and internationalisation of its higher education sector since the beginning of the 2000s, Switzerland has started to move away from the Humboldtien model and to experiment with new kinds of junior and intermediate academic positions, whilst maintaining their temporary nature to a large extent. Innovative policies to support the PhD and postdoctoral careers of young researchers have been adopted, notably by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) (Fassa and Kradolfer, 2013). This foundation, created in 1952, is mandated by the federal government to support research in all academic disciplines, from anthropology to medicine or engineering. Although other research funding bodies exist in the country, the SNSF is the main source of funding for early stage academic careers in Swiss universities. Through the SNSF programmes, tenured academics can apply for project-based research funding (e.g., for buying lab equipment, hiring PhDs or postdocs, covering eldwork expenses), usually for a period of 3-4 years at a time. The SNSF also supports other scientic activities, such as conferences, publications, etc. However, most of the funds provided by the SNSF are spent on scientic support sta (individually or as part of a project team). In 2013, 73% of the funds allocated by the SNSF were dedicated to "nancing individual salaries and/or fellowships in the context of career funding or for the appointment of sta (including PhDs) to work on SNSF-funded research projects" (SNSF, 2015 : 13).

Figure 1 :

 1 Figure 1: Evolution of Swiss academic sta(1980 -2014)

Figure 2 :

 2 Figure 2: The evolution of women's share of dierent types of academic employment,Switzerland (2000Switzerland ( -2012) )

  cal interview data on leavers to identify three distinct ideal-type models of the leaky pipeline. Among our seven interviewees who leaved the academic pathway, we have chosen individual cases(Ragin and Becker, 1992 ; Passeron and Revel, 2005) that cover a relatively diverse panel of the ex-postdocs that we met during our study (in terms of age, social origin, family circumstances and nationality) in order to provide a global understanding of the way gender norms and practices can inuence the nature of individual trajectories out of the academic career path. As we will see through our cases analysis, although almost all of our interviewees (man and women alike) mention the relative precariousness of an academic career at some point in the interview, the accounts provided by those who have left the academic career track are clearly shaped by their current family circumstances and by their gendered expectations for the future. A "female carer" account of leaving the academy : "wait and see" about work-life balance issues In this sub-section we will present the cases of Maria and Jennifer 1 . At the time of the interview, one (Maria) was working as a part-time secondary school teacher. The other (Jennifer) was unemployed and thinking about training to be a Taï-chi instructor. Both of them justify their decision not to pursue an academic career with reference to the diculties they experienced in nding the right "balance" between their work commitment and their family duties during their postdoctoral years. In their narratives, the university and their families appear as equally greedy institutions (Coser, 1974 ; Marry and Jonas, 2005). Their accounts of these diculties echo those of a number of women who work outside the home in the Swiss context, particularly those with young children and a partner who is working full-time 2 . Maria is one of our oldest interviewees (48 years old). She is Swiss and has two children, aged 15 and 12 years at the time of the interview. Before defending her PhD, Maria has been research assistant for several years at the university. Once she obtained a PhD in the life sciences, she was employed for almost 15 years in a series of xed-term research jobs at our target university. In 2010, she decided to quit academia, in Preprint version

  explanations for the decision to leave the academic career track, despite the fact that these women have accumulated several years of work experience in academic jobs. However, it is important to note that both of them appear to be committed to quite normative gender arrangements at home. Their stated preference for part-time and/or exible jobs reects the dominant normative expectations towards mothers in the Swiss context(Giraud and Lucas, 2013) and also provides some compensation for the long working hours (i.e. unavailability at home) of their respective husbands. Both declare that they were relatively satised with their succession of part-time postdocs positions, except for the fact that their institution obviously expected them to be available to work beyond the limits of their formal employment contacts.

  study in this section (Miguel and Tobias), had been working outside academia for a number of years at the time of the interview. Miguel is a manager in a biomedical rm, whereas Tobias is working for the Swiss federal administration in Bern. For both of them, the decision to leave the academy was motivated by the relatively poor employment conditions oered to PhD graduates within Swiss universities, in comparison to other sectors of the national labour market. Their narratives suggest that the decision to leave was related to a desire to maintain a normative masculine identity that they considered to the threatened by the conditions associated with the early stages of an academic career in the contemporary context. Miguel, who is born in Latin America, came to Switzerland after two postdoctoral experiences in dierent European countries, mainly because his partner was already settled in Switzerland. At the time of the interview he was 30 years old, in a stable relationship with a Swiss female lawyer, with no children. He decided to quit the academic career path a year and a half after joining our target university. His decision was motivated by the fact that, over time, he came to realise that "[he] didn't really like the job of group leader in academia that much : it's all about writing research proposals and managing budgets and research teams, not much about research, really". From his point of view, the job required too much commitment considering the very limited medium-term career perspectives he could expect to receive in return : "I didn't want to end up being over forty and still with a xed term contract" he said. To him, the lack of "career perspectives" in the academy is due to a demographic imbalance between the high number of PhDs and the limited number of permanent positions. This means that competition for permanent academic positions in his particular research eld is Preprint version very high. Given the limited career perspectives and job security in the academy, Miguel started to think about looking for a job in industry during his rst year in Switzerland. Tobias tells a similar story about his decision to leave the academy after his rst postdoc in North America. He is 35, Swiss, has one child and his partner was expecting a second baby at the time of the interview. After his PhD defence in Switzerland, he spent two years with his partner as a postdoc at a prestigious university in the US. When he came back to Switzerland, he continued to invest in his academic career, even though he didn't have a formal position to return too immediately. He took on a temporary teaching only position at his home university and published some articles with his former PhD supervisor. However, since the couple were planning to have a baby, he also applied for a managerial position with the Swiss federal administration. He got the job and his rst child was born later that year. Although Tobias sometimes misses the intellectual stimulation of academic work, he doesn't have any regrets about his choice to leave the university.

  home and family life and to the detriment of his partners' own professional career 3 . At the time of the interview, Simon, who is Swiss, was aged 35 and was living with a partner and her two children (aged 9 and 15 years) from a previous relationship. He was working as a part-time lecturer (40% contract) at the target university, but was also working parttime (60%) for an international organisation located in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. In a similar vein to Miguel and Tobias, Simon mentions the "psychological stress" he is currently experiencing, due to the uncertainty of ever being able to get a stable position within the Swiss academic sector. However, in the course of the interview, it becomes clear that his aspirations for stability are not framed in accordance with the dominant "male breadwinner" model to which the other male interviewees refer. On the contrary, Simon explains that in order to have any chance of continuing along (and ultimately up) the academic career path, he should now be thinking of applying for another postdoc mobility grant. In fact, in his eld of research, he would probably need to move to several locations over the coming years, in order to gain experience and build up his academic networks. The obligation to be internationally mobile that he sees as a prerequisite for a successful academic career in Switzerland is very problematic for Simon. Not only are the potential rewards for this mobility too uncertain

  career path is particularly relevant to the "leaky pipeline" debate. As noted in previous studies on the Swiss academic labour market(Studer, 2012), early stage academic jobs appear to be far more precarious and unpredictable than those available in alternative sectors of the Swiss labour market.The widespread development of intermediary, xedterm, often part-time, research and teaching positions in Swiss universities has undoubtedly modied the gendered logics that underpinned the decisions of male and female postdocs to remain in the academic career "pipeline" or to quit in favour of alternative employment opportunities. We have shown that, in the Swiss context, the aspirations of postdocs to remain in academic employment or to look for non-academic jobs is directly related to their position within the domestic division of labour and to their combined employment and family-care aspirations. However, it

  Not only does the unequal share of domestic labour at home make in objectively dicult for them to conform to the normative expectations of the geographically mobile, highly committed, very productive postdoc, their family circumstances also reduce the imperative for them to develop strong, upwardly mobile career aspirations for themselves, be it within or outside the academy. They are generally forced to leave their prolonged postdoc status solely by the employment rules of the target university, which prevent them from working for more the ve consecutive years on each of the xed-term, non tenure-track teaching or research positions they have been oered. Unlike the egalitarian type, when these women leave the academy (often up to 10 or 15 years after they defended their PhD) they frequently undertake some form of retraining, and continue to work part-time or episodically in areas that are far removed from their research expertise, whilst devoting more time to their home and family.

  Baudelot C and Serre D (2006) Les paradoxes d'une satisfaction: ou comment les femmes jugent leur salaire. Travail, genre et sociétés 15: 121-138. Beaufa¸s S and Krais B (2005) Femmes dans les carrières scientiques en Allemagne: les mécanismes cachés du pouvoir. Travail, genre et sociétés 14: 49 68. Bideault M and Rossi P (2014) Les personnels enseignants de l'enseignement supérieur de l'année universitaire 2012-2013 , Paris : Direction générale des ressources humaines, Ministère de l'Éducation nationale, de l'enseignement supérieur et de la recherche. Bideault M and Rossi P (2013) Les personnels enseignants de l'enseignement supérieur sous tutelle du MESR, 2011-2012 , Paris : Note d'information Enseignement supérieur & recherche, MESR-DGESIP-DGRI-SIES, 8 pages. Bryson C and Barnes N (2000) The Casualisation of Employment in Higher Education in the United Kingdom. In M Tight (ed.) Academic Work and Life: What It Is to Be an Academic, and How This Is Changing, Amsterdam: Elsevier Science, 187241. Bütler M (2006) Le rendement eectif du travail pour les familles avec des petits enfants. St Gallen: Département d'économie publique, gender relations and employment: the decline of the male breadwinner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Currie J, Harris P, and Thiele B (2000) Sacrices in greedy universities : Are they gendered ? Gender and Education, 12 (3), 269-291. Davoine E and Ravasi C (2013) The relative stability of national career patterns in European top management careers in the age of globalization: A comparative study in France, Germany,

  2014) La relève scientique dans les universités suisses: indicateurs statistiques concernant les conditions de travail et les perspectives de carrière. Bern: SERI. Ehrenberg RG (2006) The changing nature of the faculty and faculty employment practices. In: Clark R and d'Ambrosio M (eds.), The New Balancing Act in the Business of Higher Education, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 103117. Enders J (2001) Academic sta in Europe: Changing contexts and conditions. Westport: Greenwood. Enders J and Musselin C (2008) Back to the future? The academic professions in the 21st century. In OECD, Higher education to 2030. Volume 1: Demography, Paris: OECD Publishing, 125150. European Commission (2015) She Figures. Gender in Research and Innovation. Brussels: Directorate General for Research and Innovation. Fassa F and Kradolfer S (2013) The Gendering of Excellence Through Quality Criteria: The case of the Swiss National Science Foundation Professorships in Switzerland. Tertiary Education and Management 19(3): 189204. Fassa F and Kradolfer S (eds.) (2010) Le plafond de fer à l'Université : femmes et carrières, Genève : Bailyn L (1996) Challenging the Last Boundary: Reconnecting Work and Family. In: Arthur MB and Rousseau DM (eds) The Boundaryless Career. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 256-267. François P and Musselin C (2015) Les organisations et leurs marchés du travail: Une comparaison du monde musical et universitaire. L'Année sociologique 65(2): 305-332. Giraud O and Lucas B (2009) Le renouveau des régimes de genre en Allemagne et en Suisse : Bonjour 'néo-maternalisme' ? Cahiers du genre, 46 : 17-46.

Table 1 :

 1 Declared intention to pursue an academic career amongst post-docs in Swiss universities, according to nationality and sex, in 2011 (%) Nationality Sex Denit. Prob. Prob. not Denit. not No Id. Tot. N

	Foreign	Men	52	32	9	2	5	100	780
		Women	39	39	13	3	6	100	737
		Total	46	36	11	2	6	100 1517
	Swiss	Men	37	31	21	5	6	100	431
		Women	34	32	23	6	4	100	449
		Total	36	31	22	6	5	100	880
	careers. We conducted 40 interviews with postdocs who
	were working or had been working previously at a Swiss
	University, either in social sciences and humanities

section is based on qualitative data collected in the context of a European research project focusing on gender inequalities during the early stages of academic Preprint version (SSH) or in the life sciences (LS).

Table 2 :

 2 Interview sample (col %)

	Variables

The question of geographical mobility and location had been an issue for Maria for a long time. Immediately after her PhD, she took up a postdoc position in the US. However, because she didn't want to be separated from her then-to-be husband for too long, she decided to come back to Switzerland after just 18 months. With hindsight, she believes that coming back "too soon" said, "it can take a large amount of her time, and then she may have not enough energy to dedicate to an academic career". She believes that secondary school teaching will limit the (often implicit) demands for After defending a PhD in the social sciences at our target university, during which time she also had her two children, Jennifer obtained a mobility grant in order to complete a two year postdoc in Berlin. situation, doing round-trips, totally nished me o", she said. After almost two years of commuting between her home and her host institution, she experienced what she describes as a "burn out". She was put on sick leave for several months, because she couldn't even