Anne Gielen and Esmée Zwiers receive Microdata Access Grant
Research fellow Anne Gielen (Erasmus University Rotterdam) and candidate fellow Esmée Zwiers (University of Amsterdam) have been awarded aN ODISSEI Microdata Access Grant for a research project on the impact of (peri)menopause on women’s careers.
Hormones at work: The impact of (peri)menopause on women’s careers
The share of middle-aged working women has increased over the past decades. This implies that an increasing number of women experience a major biological transition during their working lives: the menopause. Although most women experience various types of physical and mental discomfort in the years around menopause, there is little knowledge about the impact of these symptoms on their careers.
With this research project Gielen and Zwiers fill the gap in the literature by studying how experiencing menopausal symptoms influences the labour market and health outcomes of women in the years around menopause. To causally identify these effects, they use two sources of naturally occurring variation. First, they exploit variation in the age at menopause across women. Second, they use variation in hormone replacement therapy (HRT) treatment due to controversy in the early 2000s that was alleviated in 2017. This project will provide important results to bolster gender equality in the labor market.
The national research infrastructure for the social sciences in the Netherlands ODISSEI (Open Data Infrastructure for Social Science and Economic Innovations), together with Statistics Netherlands (CBS), is making this grant available.