November 27, 2023 | News | New faces at MPIDR

Welcome, Julia Leesch!

Julia Leesch joins the team of the Research Group Gender Inequalities and Fertility. © MPIDR/Wilhelm

The research group Gender Inequalities and Fertility welcomes Julia Leesch as a new team member. Julia holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from Trinity College Dublin. In her dissertation, Julia examined the extent to which time trends and cross-country differences in 'who marries whom' in terms of education are driven by variation in structural opportunities in the mate market and the degree of non-randomness by which available women and men sort into unions and marriages. More broadly, Julia is interested in changes in the socioeconomic composition of couples and families and their implications for social inequality.
 
While working at MPIDR over the next two years, Julia plans to focus, among other things, on the impact of changes in the educational composition of partner markets on fertility outcomes.

What’s your job at MPIDR and how long will you be working here?
For the next two years I will be a postdoctoral researcher in the research group “Gender Inequalities and Fertility”.

What is your motivation to work in this field of research?
Research has extensively focused on studying how parents pass socioeconomic inequalities to their children. However, the role of demographic pathways in the transmission of inequalities between two generations has been examined less frequently. This inspired me to study questions such as ‘who marries whom’ and ‘who has children with whom’.

Why did you choose MPIDR as your new employer?
I was really excited that many researchers at MPIDR are working on questions related to my own research.

Where are you from? What do you miss most about home (and maybe: what don’t you miss at all)?
I am from southern Germany, but I have lived in Dublin for the last 4 years. At the moment I miss my friends and colleagues in Dublin and the beautiful Irish landscape. But I am happy that Rostock is much more affordable than Dublin.            

What is your favorite and what is your least favorite part about work?
I like that I can develop my own projects, but I wish I would work in a field where progress is more immediately visible.