Klarita Gërxhani elected as member of KNAW

Gërxhani is Professor in Socio-Economics and head of department of Ethics, Governance and Society, at the School of Business and Economics (SBE) of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

She conducts innovative research at the intersection of economics and sociology. Her research focuses on institutions, social status, and the mechanisms behind gender bias and inequality in the labor market. She is also interested in the informal economy, such as undeclared work, and employers' recruitment strategies. In her research, she combines various methods, including laboratory and field experiments and survey data. 

For example, she demonstrated through experiments that women perform equally well as men on a math task as long as they can work in isolation. However, once they hear that they will be compared to others, their performance declines, while men tend to perform better. This is due to deep-rooted gender stereotypes regarding competence and empathy, as shown by Gërxhani. 

Much of her research has policy implications, i.e. to promote diversity and equality in organizations: it is not enough to simply hire more women and people from diverse backgrounds. The stereotypes must also be challenged, and work arrangements adjusted.

Gërxhani has published in various journals, for example, the Harvard Business Review, Journal of Political Economy, Annual Review of Sociology, Journal of Institutional Economics, European Economic Review.

News item is partly reposted from the website of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Find the original item here.

More research on gender inqeuality

The School of Business and Economics (SBE) of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam recently published an interview with Klarita Gërxhani about her research on gender inqeuality and position as head of the new department of Ethics, Governance and Society. Read the interview here.

Summer School on Gender and Society

Klarita will be teachting the summer course Gender in Society (July 8-12, 2024) together with Katharina Brutt. The course is part of the 2024 Tinbergen Institute Summer School program.