Throughout her career, Professor Zippel has used a comparative, cross-national, and global perspective to create bridges and synergies between gender, science, organizations, and policy studies.
Her books and articles examine the mechanisms through which gender equality (a core value of liberal modernity) has been slow, at times stalling, and highly uneven across key institutions such as education, work, science and politics. Recent research explores gender and global transformations of science and education.
This research uncovers points of leverage and/or weakness for specific policies, institutional arrangements, and various negotiations among increasingly transnational actors. Such comparative analyses help to explain why some countries and institutions adopted measures to further the cause of equity, while others have not.
Dr. Zippel's North America-based team explores the variability and inconsistency of gender and change across institutions and countries that have witnessed decades of contentious debates about equality along with a diversity of legal reforms, policies, interventions, and social movements aimed at addressing (or resisting) it to varying degrees.
BRIEF BIO
Following a position as Professor of Sociology at Northeastern University, Kathrin Zippel was appointed Einstein Strategic Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies at Freie Universität Berlin on July 1st 2022. Zippel was a co-chair of the Social Exclusion and Inclusion Seminar at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies Harvard University and a residential fellow at the Women and Public Policy Program at the Harvard Kennedy School. She served as co-PI of Northeastern’s National Science Foundation ADVANCE Institutional Transformation grant. She also held a Humboldt Research fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne and the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich and was a guest at Radboud University, Nijmegen, the WZB Social Science Research Center in Berlin, and the European University Institute in Florence. Zippel received a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and held a postdoctoral position at the European Union Center of New York at Columbia University.