Researching Gender Gaps: Alina Sowa at Harvard and Williams College

IDOS PhD student Alina Sowa researches gender inequality using large-scale survey data and econometric methods.

As part of her PhD, Alina Sowa completed a short research stay at Harvard Business School, where she visited Professor Anke Becker, whose research focuses on Economic Development and the Economics of Gender. During her stay, Alina Sowa spoke with researchers at Harvard about her work from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) project on Gender Inequality and Social Policies. This project aims to identify causal relationships between social norms or policies and different dimensions of gender inequality, such as gender gaps in labor market participation and child labor, using large-scale survey data and modern econometric methods. She also presented her paper “Matrilineal Kinship Norms and Gender Gaps in Labor Market Outcomes” at the Judgment and Decision Making Tea at the Harvard Kennedy School and at the Economics Brown Bag Seminar at Williams College. The presentation at Williams College took place at the invitation of Professor Owen Ozier.

The research stay was supported by the Add-on Fellowship for Interdisciplinary Economics from the Joachim Herz Stiftung.