Around one-third of the pay gap between men and women can be attributed to how companies pay their employees. This is the conclusion of an analysis of data on income and working hours for all employees in the private sector in ten European countries and the US state of Washington for the years 2010 to 2019. Germany stands out negatively in this international comparison: nowhere else is the contribution of companies to the gender wage gap so high.
Social background influences how hard children try. However, incentives at school can reduce socioeconomic inequalities, as a new study by Jonas Radl and Heike Solga shows.
The Research Department Migration, Integration, Transnationalization invites submissions for the 12th Annual Conference on Migration and Diversity, titled “The Cultural Evolution of Migration and Diversity.” The conference, organized by Steije Hofhuis, Ruud Koopmans, and Irene Pañeda-Fernández, will take place on September 25–26, 2026 at the WZB in Berlin.
“Challenges to International Orders: Causes and Consequences” is the topic of our 2nd Annual Interdisciplinary Conference, which will take place from 7–9 October. We warmly invite you to submit your paper and to share the call for papers within your networks.
WZB researcher Dana Burchardt has been a Heisenberg Fellow since last year. She is pursuing a research project entitled “Interacting Legal Spaces” in which she analyses how different international, regional, national and transnational legal spaces interrelate.
How do voters react to the emergence of new “radically progressive” parties perceived? A WZB study shows that the electoral success of new parties is leading to a countermovement towards conservative parties.
Democratic Self-Defense in Times of Autocratization
WZB researcher Johannes Gerschewski has been a Heisenberg Fellow since January 2026. He is conducting research in his new project “Democratic Self-Defense in Times of Autocratization”, where he explores how democracies can resist and revert ongoing autocratization processes. The Heisenberg Fellowship is funded by the German Research Foundation.
We congratulate WZB researcher Fabio Ellger and Heike Klüver for winning the Gordon Smith and Vincent Wright Memorial Prize 2025. Awarded by Taylor & Francis and the editors of West European Politics, the prize recognises their important analysis on the influence of radical right parties.
Controlling the digital public sphere is costly. To achieve this, authoritarian governments often rely on direct investments from other autocracies in Internet infrastructure, as shown in a new study by Lisa Garbe.
The WZB wishes you happy holidays and a good start to the New Year! The graphic illustrates the finding that democratization and autocratization processes spread in waves around the world.
