"My study visit to the US hugely influenced my life, both personally and academically," says Professor Jutta Allmendinger. It was thanks to a DAAD scholarship that the sociology graduate went to study at the University of Wisconsin in the mid-1980s and completed a graduate course in sociology, economics, and statistics. She later enrolled at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, where she completed her doctorate in social sciences in 1989. During this time she came across a noticeable number of women who teach at elite universities in America and have children at the same time.

"You also see many couples there, working at the same institution," explains Allmendinger. That's quite normal in America, she says. "The attitude over there certainly helped me realise that children and academic career do not necessarily rule each other out." Allmendinger herself managed both: Her son Phillip Laudris was born in 1994.

Two years previously she had been appointed Professor of Sociology at the Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich. She took leave from there to pursue her work in Nuremberg. From February 2003 to the end of 2006, she headed the Institute for Labour Market and Career Research (IAB) there, part of the Federal Employment Agency. With her core research areas in the sociology of the labour market, educational sociology, social inequality, social policy, organisations and curricula vitae, she was very close to the political decision-making levels. Hartz IV and its consequences provided her institute with work as did the debates on demographic changes to society and to the German education system. Allmendinger was highly sceptical of the changes made to the education system and, for instance, called for young people not only to be prepared for one specific job and advocated the need for people to be fundamentally prepared for acquiring qualifications over a lifetime: "The ability to learn how to learn must be stimulated and fostered." She sees the introduction of tuition fees without offering adequate scholarship programmes as a step in the wrong direction. Professor Allmendinger can be expected to contribute much more to such debates in the future. 2004 saw her become a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and in 2005 she was appointed to the University Council of the Darmstadt University of Technology. She has been a member of the Scientific Commission of the German Science Council since 2006.

On 1 April 2007, Jutta Allmendinger became the first woman to hold the position of President of the Social Science Research Centre Berlin (WZB). Some 140 economists, political scientists, sociologists, historians and lawyers do research there, on topics such as labour market and employment policy, social inequality, democracy and civil society.