Léa Pessin, ENSAE-CREST research professor, awarded with ERC Starting Grants!

Léa Pessin recently joined ENSAE-CREST, on the Institut Polytechnique de Paris campus, as an assistant professor of Sociology and Demography. Léa Pessin was awarded the ERC Starting Grant to work on Social Inequalities in Work-Family Strategies Within and Across 24 Industrialized Countries (WeEqualize).

“WeEqualize” is a research project that aims to understand the complex dynamics of the gender revolution’s impact on work-family patterns in different-sex couples across 24 countries from the 1960s to the present. It acknowledges that despite predictions of linear progress toward gender equality in work and home responsabilities, various structural and cultural factors have stalled this convergence in industrialized countries. The project seeks to characterize and quantify social inequalities in work-family strategies, identify typologies of these strategies, and examine their prevalence across education levels and countries. It also explores the role of contextual factors, changing demographics, and the influence of gender beliefs and labor market constraints on couples’ choices. WeEqualize combines computational methods and survey-based experimental data to challenge and reshape our understanding of gender equality within families.

Her research agenda focuses on the unequal consequences of the gender revolution on women’s work and family outcomes across class, race, and contexts. She applies quantitative methods to cross-national and longitudinal data to explore variation across countries and time. Her work has been published in Demography, Social Forces, The Journal of Marriage and Family, Demographic Research, The European Sociological Review, and The Journal of Personal and Social Relationships.

Léa holds a PhD in Sociology and Demography from the Pompeu Fabra University (Spain) obtained in 2016. She also completed an NICHD postdoctoral fellow at the Population Research Institute and spent the last year of her Ph.D. as a visiting pre-doctoral scholar at the Maryland Population Research Center.

She was a 2018 Work and Family Researchers Network Early Career Fellow. Before joining ENSAE-CREST, Léa previously worked in the department of Sociology and Criminology and was a faculty associate at the Population Research Institute at the Pennsylvania State University.