Research in Gender

Diksha Arora's current research focuses on the relationship between climate change, macro policy and gender disparities in access to decent work in Latin America. She has also conducted research examining gendered time poverty and its impact on household income and resilience to climate change, and gender-based constraints to adoption of climate-smart practices. 

Besides academic research, she has worked with local- and national-level policymakers in several Latin American countries to promote uptake of gender considerations in their local development programs and climate-change adaptation policies. She has also worked with several international organizations such as the World Bank, FAO and CGIAR. Most recently, her work with World Bank and Canada Caribbean Resilience Fund helped promote gender mainstreaming in disaster risk management policies in Caribbean countries.

Günseli Berik’s research examines gender inequalities in livelihood and well-being outcomes—earnings, working conditions, training, population sex ratios, time use in the household. Her empirical research has focused on Turkey, Taiwan, Korea, Bangladesh, the US, and Utah. In recent research she examines aggregate well-being measures that incorporate unpaid work and the environment; street harassment in South Asia; and the feminist project in economics. She served as editor of the journal Feminist Economics between 2010 and 2017. 

Haimanti Bhattacharya's research falls under the broad rubric of applied microeconomics and has three specific themes: environment, resource & food, psychology & economics, and gender. Her gender research examines different aspects of violence against women, including the relationship between engaging in paid work and spousal violence. She has also engaged with interdisciplinary research teams to examine perceptions and implications of sexual violence against women. The main geographic focus of her research is India.

Pavitra Govindan is a behavioral and experimental economist specializing in the topics of social norms and behavioral change, gender differences in self-promotion, and role of institutions in promoting gender diversity.  She has conducted lab experiments with university students, lab-in-the-field experiments in rural India, and online experiments on Qualtrics and Amazon Mechanical Turk. She has been a faculty member in the Economics department at the University of Utah since 2018.

Eunice Han is a labor economist, specializing in labor relations and educational policy. Her research focuses on workers’ well-being and inequality. Because the goals of labor unions are aligned with these topics, many of her studies examine the relationship between unions and labor market outcomes in both the private and public sectors. In particular, she is interested in understanding gender differences in employment, labor earnings, and other labor market conditions, as well as identifying tools to close the gender gap.

Codrina Rada is a macroeconomist with an interest in issues of growth and income distribution. She uses theoretical and empirical tools to study trends in income inequality in modern economies and the effect of rising inequality on economic activity within the context of global economic integration. Her gender research uses computable general equilibrium (CGE) framework to examine the impacts of gender inequality on food security in Mozambique and Ethiopia.

Catherine Ruetschlin studies labor market inequalities and public policy. Her current research is focused on markets for childcare and the labor market for childcare workers. In 2021 and 2022, she worked with Utah’s Department of Workforce Services Office of Child Care to evaluate access to and affordability of childcare services across the state. She also contributed to a forthcoming interdisciplinary study with the US Department of Veterans Affairs examining the labor market challenges facing female veterans. Catherine has taught at the University of Utah since 2018.  

Sarah Small’s research falls under the broad umbrella of feminist economics. Her current research focuses on a variety of topics including intrahousehold bargaining, care work, the occupational crowding hypothesis, and history of feminist economic thought. Much of her work aims to understand how households allocate unpaid labor in the United States, especially within couples facing differences in income, union membership, and business ownership. She also studies how economics courses can be made more inviting to women. Before joining the University of Utah in 2022, she was a Feminist Economics Fellow and a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Women and Work at Rutgers University.