Principal investigator
Léa Pessin is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Programme Director in Social Inequality at the European University Institute. She studies labor markets, gender inequality, unpaid work and work-family dynamics across welfare regimes.
Team at the EUI
Maša Krajnc, PhD researcher, Department of Political and Social Sciences, EUI. Her thesis, The Role of Organizations in Shaping Work-Family Strategies, asks how the organizations people work in shape, constrain and enable the way couples divide paid and unpaid work. Research on the gendered division of labor within households and research on organizations as sites where inequality is produced have developed in isolation from each other; her work brings the two together, using linked German panel and administrative data, employer-employee surveys and original survey experiments. Within WeEqualize she leads the project’s first survey experiment, a dyadic factorial survey on workplace policies and couples’ bargaining, in collaboration with Léa Pessin and Valentina Di Stasio and fielded first in Germany, which asks how workplace conditions enter the trade-offs couples make between partners’ jobs and household work.
Former team members
Former postdoctoral researchers on WeEqualize at the EUI, listed with their current positions.
- Kimberly McErlean, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Fairfield University. Postdoctoral research fellow on WeEqualize, 2024 to 2026. Her research lies at the intersection of marriage and families, social class, gender and public policy, and explores the drivers of social class disparities in marriage and divorce and the structural factors shaping these family outcomes.
- Camille Portier, Assistant Professor in Sociology, Trinity College Dublin. Postdoctoral research fellow on WeEqualize, 2025 to 2026. A sociologist of gender, work and stratification, she uses sociological and demographic perspectives to investigate how gendered norms and institutional contexts shape inequalities in labor market outcomes, work-family arrangements and health across social contexts, time and cohorts.
- Melody Ge Gao, Scientist, Singapore Longitudinal Early Development Study (SG-LEADS), A*STAR. Postdoctoral research fellow on WeEqualize, 2024 to 2025. Her research lies at the intersection of economic inequality, family demography and health. Her dissertation used the American Time Use Survey to trace educational disparities in how US mothers combine employment and childcare, and what this means for their well-being.
Collaborators
- Kevin Munger, Assistant Professor and Chair of Computational Social Science, Department of Political and Social Sciences, European University Institute. He uses computational and experimental methods to study the implications of the internet and social media for the communication of political information. Co-author, with Léa Pessin, of the project’s visual conjoint study (Sociological Science, 2026); they are now working on fielding similar experiments in different countries, and on ongoing work on youth gender polarization across the OECD.
- Elena Maria Pojman, Research Scientist (Postdoc), Kinship Inequalities Group, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock. Her research examines how families renegotiate obligations: who counts as kin, who provides care and housework, and to whom tasks are assigned, with attention to how gender, sexuality, race-ethnicity and education stratify these responsibilities and how policy and institutional context set the terms. Visiting researcher at the EUI in spring 2025, where she and Léa Pessin started developing the synthetic couples method.
- Sarah Damaske, Roy C. Buck Professor of American Institutions and Sociology, Labor and Employment Relations, and Women’s Studies, Penn State University. Fernand Braudel Senior Fellow at the EUI in the academic year 2025 to 2026. She and Léa Pessin are writing a book on precarious employment and gender inequality.
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them. This work is supported by ERC grant WeEqualize (101117327, DOI 10.3030/101117327).
