May 21, 2024 | News

Congratulations Carla Rowold!

Carla Rowold successfully defended her Phd thesis at the University of Oxford. © private

Carla Rowold, who joined the Research Group Labour Demography in April, has successfully defended her PhD thesis “An accumulation of gender inequalities in old age? Exploring life course- and gender-sensitive approaches for analysing Gender Pension Gaps” at the University of Oxford.

Carla's thesis examines the gender pension gap, i.e. the difference in average pension income between men and women, from a more gender- and life-course-sensitive perspective. Since traditional approaches often overlook the complex mechanisms of inequality that develop over individuals' life courses, she implemented novel combinations of methods to better capture and quantify these dynamics. The results show that, regardless of the pension system, the overarching driver of the gender pension gap is the large amount of unpaid care work that only women perform over the life course and that is not rewarded equivalently in pension systems. Thus, high gender pension inequality is the result of the interaction between twentieth-century welfare state contexts that incentivised a traditional gendered division of labour and contemporary pension policies that reward the resulting gendered life courses in a highly unequal manner. Addressing the mismatch between current pension designs and past welfare state policies for women is crucial for pension policymakers to mitigate the reproduction of gender inequalities in old age.

The dissertation was supervised by Christian Moonden at the University of Oxford.

At the MPIDR, Carla will be part of the MaxHel Center. She will work on the accumulation of work and family complexities over the life course and their consequences for inequalities in old age, such as health, wealth and pension inequalities.