Thesis Title (preliminary): 'An accumulation of gender inequalities in old age? Exploring life course and gender sensitive approaches for analysing (gendered) differences in old age outcomes'.
I earned my BA and MA degree in Social Sciences at Humboldt University Berlin where I focussed on social inequalities and later specialised further on gender inequalities. Beside my studies I have worked as research assistant at the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW Berlin, Department Public Economics), where mostly conducted research on old age inequalities and particularly the Gender Pension Gap across European countries.
My research interests overall include (gender) inequalities over the life course, social demography as well as the impact of family and retirement policies.
My DPhil builds on my masters-level research in which I applied a gender and life course sensitive combination of methods (Sequence Analysis and Kitagawa-Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition) to analyse the gender pension gaps across Europe based on retrospective and longitudinal data. Preliminarily, my research aims to disentangle how gender inequalities in the work force and the family unfold over the life course and to what extent these shape old age inequalities between men and women. I aim to focus on financial and health outcomes as well as to examine to what extent these mechanisms differ across welfare state and normative contexts by conducting country comparisons. Furthermore, I aim to develop and discuss life course and gender sensitive approaches regarding research design and methods to empirically study these old age outcomes.