Equality and inclusion

Professor Ganguli joined Essex in 2012, having obtained his PhD at Cornell University (USA) and then having taught at the University of Cambridge and the University of Nottingham. His research and teaching interests are in economic theory, financial economics, and behavioural economics. He has been awarded research funding from the Institute for New Economic Thinking (USA), the Economic and Social Research Council (UK), and the Bank of England.
 
He currently serves as the Economics Pathway Lead for Essex in the SeNSS DTP.  He also serves as an Associate Editor at the Economic Journal of the Royal Economic Society (UK). 

Zeina Alsharkas completed her PhD with a specialism in the empirical analysis of competition, in particular, in innovative markets.

She completed her Master's degree at Essex in the same subject area and taught extensively as part of her programme at Essex, earning an excellence in teaching award in 2017.

Dr Jiang joined Essex in 2017, after completing her PhD at the University of Lausanne. Her work is in behavioural and experimental economics. Her work includes empirical studies of peer effects, including among male and female elite athletes.  She recently made a presentation at a conference in London on Women in Social Science, to see the full presentation please view the (.pdf).

She teaches applied economics and the economics of organisation.

Professor Friederike Mengel joined Essex in 2012. She studies behaviour in social networks, and the emergence of social norms, among other areas. Her work on gender bias recently received coverage in The Economist.

She leads the Behavioural Economics programme at Essex and serves as Research Director for the Department. She serves in editorial capacity on four leading journals and has been named to the Council of the Royal Economic Society.

Claire and Carol operate an innovative job-share model which allows them to successfully fulfil their senior administrative role in the department whilst achieving a work-life balance to meet their other commitments. Outside of the Economics job-share, Claire is mother to a toddler and Carol works for a local charity.

Data from six cohorts of university graduates in Germany was used to assess the extent of gender gaps in college and labour market performance twelve to eighteen months after graduation.

Read the full paper in the University of Essex research repository.

This research documents a gender gap in criminal activities, based on property crimes, using data from the U.S. National Incident Based Reporting System from 1995 to 2015. In this study, a gender participation gap is evidenced, with only 30 percent of the crimes being committed by females.

Read the full paper in the University of Essex research repository.

This paper provides new evidence on gender bias in teaching evaluations. We exploit a quasi-experimental dataset of 19,952 student evaluations of university faculty in a context where students are randomly allocated to female or male instructors. Despite the fact that neither students’ grades nor self-study hours are affected by the instructor’s gender, we find that women receive systematically lower teaching evaluations than their male colleagues.

Read the full paper in the University of Essex research repository.

Using data from a large-scale field experiment, this research shows that while there is no gender difference in the willingness to make risky decisions on behalf of a group in a sample of children, a large gap emerges in a sample of adolescents. The proportion of girls who exhibit leadership willingness drops by 39% going from childhood to adolescence. We explore the possible factors behind this drop and find that it is largely associated with a dramatic decline in “social confidence”, measured by the willingness to perform a real effort task in public.

Read the full paper in the University of Essex research repository.

We evaluate the medium-term impacts of treating maternal depression on women's mental health, financial empowerment, and parenting decisions. We leverage variation induced by a cluster-randomized control trial that provided psychotherapy to 903 pre-natally depressed mothers in rural Pakistan. It was one of the world's largest psychotherapy interventions, and it dramatically reduced postpartum depression. Seven years after psychotherapy concluded, we returned to the study site to find that impacts on women's mental health had persisted, with a 17% reduction in depression rates. The intervention also improved women's financial empowerment and increased both time- and money-intensive parental investments by between 0.2 and 0.3 standard deviations.

Read the full paper in the University of Essex research repository.