The Project

Overview

Research shows that highly skilled migrant women often find themselves in poor-quality jobs or remain unemployed. In the legal profession, migrant women face significant obstacles, including gender discrimination, limited access to mentoring opportunities, underrepresentation in leadership roles, and cultural and language barriers. These challenges are often heightened in Germany, where the job market for foreign lawyers is further restricted by the requirement to pass state exams, frequently leading to employment below their qualifications or, more commonly, to unemployment.

Qualified migrant women graduated from Master’s and Doctoral programs at the Faculty of Law of the University of Göttingen often have valuable experience as lawyers, judges, prosecutors, public servants, professors, and researchers in their home countries that could enrich the German labor market.

The Faculty of Law has offered for years Master’s programs for foreign students and has taken many students with refugee status who have been struggling to insert into the German labor market and cannot return to their origin countries. Therefore, orientation and preparation for foreign female lawyers for these opportunities is needed at the Faculty of Law. This project aims to address this gap by offering tailored guidance on career development opportunities in the legal field for current foreign master's students, PhD candidates, postdocs, and alumni.

'Foreign Female Academics in Law for the German Labor Market' aims to complement the existing career promotion programs at the University of Göttingen by focusing on the needs and unique profiles of professionals and researchers in the legal field. Through this project, specialized information sessions, hybrid meetings, and coaching sessions will be conducted to equip highly qualified foreign female graduates from the Faculty of Law to explore further opportunities for research career development.

This project, supported by the Professorinnenprogramm at the Faculty of Law, will help address gender inequalities by equipping highly qualified women with the knowledge and network needed to advance their careers. It will help facilitate the integration of foreign female scholars into the German labor market and society.

Finally, the project aligns with the gender equality policies of the University of Göttingen, the BMBF's Female Professors Program, the Skilled Worker Initiative of Lower Saxony (Start Guides: Career Beginnings for International Students and Graduates), and the program on Women and Migrationfrom the Ministry of Labor, Health, Social Affairs and Gender Equality of Lower Saxony.

Aim

The project aims to support the professional development of women from diverse international backgrounds in the legal field, who are studying or have graduated from LLM and Doctoral programs at the Faculty of Law at the University of Göttingen. It will offer them tailored guidance on career development opportunities, networking resources, and relevant resources for foreign scholars in the legal field entering the German job market.