I am an Assistant Professor of Economic History. Before my current position, I worked as a PhD and postdoc at Utrecht University and was an Assistant Professor of Economics in the new interdisciplinary bachelor programme "Global Responsibility and Leadership" at Groningen University. I am interdisciplinary scholar bringing social science and history disciplines together both in my research and educational activities.

 

My research examines how institutional (finance, labor regulations, knowledge, gender norms, and family) and structural conditions (e.g., technology, and economic growth) have influenced gender equality in well-being and entrepreneurship outcomes throughout the 20th century. I propose a dynamic framework that focuses on the complementarity between these factors to explain the rise and decline in diverse forms of gender inequality (health, politics, household, work) and female entrepreneurship (business size and sectors). Previously, my PhD research gathered new open-access data on the global gender gap to explain the (non-linear) changes in the progress towards gender equality at a global level since 1820. My postdoctoral research in the Horizon 2020 project demonstrated how the (historical) complementarity of institutions explains the diversity in entrepreneurship in Europe today and implications of this complementarity for policy-making to create an 'Entrepreneurial Society' in Europe. 

 

My current research is on the historical evolution of female entrepreneurship between 1900-2020, which is funded by NWO-Veni grant. I study three key research questions about female entrepreneurship: 1) What barriers women face(d) when they start and run a business; 2) If and how these barriers change, and 3) How women’s solutions to these constraints change over time. To answer these questions, I look at the interaction between the structural and institutional factors and informal meso-micro level explanations at the level of (family) firms and household. This project aims to produce new comparable time-series data on female business-owners in Europe since 1900. I was a GAK-NIAS research fellow to carry out a pilot research on the Dutch context on this theme. Currently, I also supervise two interdisciplinary PhD projects that complements this research line, one on family businesses and gender equality and another one on the associative order and wellbeing. As part of this project, I co-edit a special Issue titled “Where Have All the Business Women Gone? Female Entrepreneurship in the long 20th Century” for Business History between 2023-2025.

 

I am one of the four executive core members of the interdisciplinary research platform "Bottom-up Initiatives for Societal Change" at UU's strategic theme Institutions for Open Societies (IOS).

 

Between 2020-2023, I served as the History Board Member of PPE, responsible for its history track and the daily management of the programme with three other PPE board members. I coordinated PPE students' skills training and led two educational project teams funded by USO to (re-)design PPE's interdisciplinary and professional skills training. As a spillover of the interdisciplinary project, I am co-editing a textbook with the working title “An Interdisciplinary PPE Approach to 21st Century Grand Challenges”.