Carla Rowold

I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Hertie School in Berlin. Previously I was a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research and obtained my PhD in Sociology from the University of Oxford and Nuffield College. I obtained my BA and MA in Social Sciences from the Humboldt University of Berlin.

My research focuses on inequalities across the life course, with a particular emphasis on capturing the complexities and multidimensional nature of these experiences. I investigate disparities at various stages of life, including the Gender Pension and Wealth Gaps at older ages, as well as inequalities at younger ages, such as educational and mental health inequalities of children, and how these relate to different aspects of life courses. Additionally, my work aims to advance methodological approaches to better understand and analyze these life course inequalities.

In my dissertation I studied the Gender Pension Gap – that is the difference between the mean pension income of women compared to the mean pension income of men. I explored life course and gender sensitive approaches to assess the link between gender inequalities over the life course and public policies, such as pension systems, with the Gender Pension Gap. The dissertation received the research award of the Research Network on Old-Age Provision (FNA) of the German Pension Insurance and the Young Scientist Award of the German Society for Demography.

Research interests

• Life course sociology
• Gender and old-age inequalities
• Family and retirement policies
• Social demography
• Quantitative methods, particularly decomposition and Sequence Analysis tools

Here you find my current research projects, here a list of my publications with replication code and summaries, and under Public Engagement (mostly in German) media contributions, policy-oriented work and my award talk.