Labour markets and gender inequality

Barbara Petrongolo is a Professor of Economics at the University of Oxford and a Professorial Fellow at Nuffield College. She is Fellow of the British Academy, Director of the CEPR Labour Economics Programme, and Research Associate at the Centre for Economic Performance of LSE. She previously held positions at Queen Mary University of London, LSE, the Paris School of Economics and the University of Carlos III (Madrid). Her primary research interests are in labour economics. She has worked extensively on the performance of labour markets with job search frictions, with applications to unemployment dynamics, welfare policy, and monopsony. Her work also researches the causes of gender inequalities in labour market outcomes, in a historical perspective and across countries, with emphasis on the role of employment selection mechanisms, structural transformation, and parenthood.

Ashwini Deshpande is Professor and Head at the Department of Economics, and Academic Director at the Centre for Economic Data and Analysis at Ashoka University, India. Her PhD and early publications were on the international debt crisis of the 1980s. Subsequently, she has been working on the economics of discrimination and affirmative action, with a focus on caste and gender in India. She has published extensively in leading scholarly journals. She is the author of Grammar of Caste: Economic Discrimination in Contemporary India, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2011 (Hardcover) and 2017 (Paperback), and Affirmative Action in India, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, Oxford India Short Introductions Series, 2013. She has edited several volumes, the latest of which is Handbook on Economics of Discrimination and Affirmative Action (Springer Major Reference Works, 2023). She is a Fellow of the International Economic Association (IEA). She received the EXIM Bank award for outstanding dissertation (now called the IERA Award) in 1994, the 2007 VKRV Rao Award for Indian economists under 45 and SKOCH Award for Gender Economics in 2022.

Almudena Sevilla is a Professor of Economic and Social Policy in the Department of Social Policy at LSE and is currently the Founding Chair of the RES UK Women in Economics Network and the LSE Women in Social and Public Policy Research Hub. She has also held positions at UCL, Queen Mary University, University of Oxford, University of Essex, and the Congressional Budget Office in Washington DC. She received her PhD from Brown University in 2004 in the fields of family and population economics and econometrics. She has a successful track record in gender economics research. Early in her career, she received the prestigious Marie J. Langlois Prize for her doctoral research on gender economics and the status of women in the academic field. Her research is regularly published in top-tier international journals, such as the American Economic Review, Demography, and the Journal of Labor Economics. She also serves on the editorial boards of leading journals, including Feminist Economics and Review of the Economics of the Household. Her work has attracted substantial research funding, including the highly competitive European Research Council Consolidator Grant of over €2 million. Sevilla holds key leadership positions in major economic associations, has recently been elected President of the Society of the Economics of the Household, and is a sought-after speaker at leading academic and policy forums, where she discusses women’s roles in the economy.