Nancy Folbre is Director of the Program on Gender and Care Work at the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a Senior Fellow of the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College.

Her research explores the interface between political economy and feminist theory, with a particular emphasis on the value of unpaid care work.

In addition to numerous articles published in academic journals, she is the editor of “For Love and Money: Care Work in the U.S.” (Russell Sage, 2012), and the author of “Greed, Lust, and Gender: A History of Economic Ideas” (Oxford, 2009), “Valuing Children: Rethinking the Economics of the Family” (Harvard, 2008), and “The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values” (New Press, 2001). She has also written widely for a popular audience, including contributions to the New York Times Economix blog, The Nation, and the American Prospect.

Shahra Razavi is the Chief of the Research & Data Section at UN Women, where she is research director of UN Women’s flagship report, Progress of the World’s Women. She specializes in the gender dimensions of development, with a particular focus on work, social policy and care.

Her recent publications include “Seen, Heard and Counted: Rethinking Care in a Development Context” (special issue of Development and Change, 2011), “Underpaid and Overworked: A Cross-national Perspective on Care Workers” (with Silke Staab, special issue of International Labour Review, 2010), and “The Gendered Impacts of Liberalization: Towards ‘Embedded Liberalism’” (2009, Routledge, New York).

Prior to joining UN Women Shahra was a senior researcher at the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD), and Visiting Professor at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Gender Studies at Universities of Bern and Fribourg. Shahra received her Bachelors in International Relations from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), and her Masters and Doctorate (D.Phil.) in Agricultural Economics from Oxford University.

International Advisory Board

Elaine Acosta

Elaine Acosta is a sociologist with a Ph.D. in International and Intercultural Studies from Deusto University, Bilbao. She has served as chair of the M.A. Program in Sociology at the Universidad Alberto Hurtado in Chile (2013-2016) and as director of the Certificate Program in Society and Humanism (2009-2016) offered by Alberto Hurtado University in Chile and Centro Fray Bartolomé de las Casas in La Habana, Cuba. Her research areas include care work, international migration, aging, childhood, and welfare policies. She is committed to research from a gender and rights-based perspective. Professor Acosta has conducted studies for international agencies (IOM, IADB, UNICEF, UNDP) and served as consultant for several governmental offices in Chile. She is currently co-director of the Interdisciplinary Research Program on Care Work, Family and Welfare (www.cuifabi.com) and member of the Care, Gender, and Citizenship Studies Network (ESOMI-Spain). Among her latest publications is her book Cuidados en crisis y mujeres migrantes hacia España y Chile. Dan más de lo que reciben (University of Deusto and Alberto Hurtado University Press, Bilbao, 2015).

Irma Arriagada

Irma Arriagada is a sociologist with graduate studies at LSE, University of London, and University of Santiago, Chile. Her research areas include family, care, and work in Chile and Latin America. Currently she is an international consultant of United Nations and visiting researcher at the Women’s Studies Center (CEM- Chile). During 1993-2008 she worked at the UN Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLAC). Her most recent published books and articles include: Families and Households in Latin America (in Spanish), edited by Colegio de México (2016); “Changes and Inequalities in Latin American Families”, in Judy Treas et. al. The Sociology of Families (Wiley-Blackwell 2014); Global Care Chains: Peruvian Women’s Role in Providing Care in Chile (in Spanish), co-authored with Rosalba Todaro (UNWomen and CEM 2012); and Social Care Organization and Rights Violation in Chile (in Spanish; UNWomen and CEM 2011).

Orly Benjamin

Orly Benjamin is a feminist sociologist and associate professor at the Sociology and Anthropology Department and the Gender Studies program at Bar-Ilan University, where she currently chairs the Poverty Research Unit. Her current research, with Sarit Nisim, Ph.D., investigates obstacles to poverty alleviation in diverse social positions. Her most recent book, “Gendering Israel’s Outsourcing: The Erasure of Employees’ Caring Skills” (2016) summarizes her research on poverty among women employed in service and care occupations (SACO). Professor Benjamin shows how job insecurity created by outsourcing privatized employees’ sense of entitlement to appropriate remuneration. The significance of this finding is in clarifying that even if employees maintain their definition of themselves as skilled, without broad feminist support, the political power position of their claim for recognition will remain weak, weakening further the professionalization of service and care occupations.

Kirstie McAllum

Kirstie McAllum is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Montreal. Her research interests focus on deepening our understanding of how non-standard workers, who do not interact regularly with each other, construct the meaning of their work, often in different ways. She is particularly interested in the organizational and occupational identities of persons who work in hybrid public-private spaces, such as workers involved in home-based care. One of her current projects looks at how persons involved in the care process such as the care recipient, his/her family, other health care professionals, and employers value the role of home-based care workers in their everyday interactions.

Anne Martin-Matthews

Anne Martin-Matthews is professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of British Columbia. Her research areas include aging and lifecourse; health and society; health and social care services; and intersections of formal and informal care. As Scientific Director of the Institute of Aging, one of 13 national Institutes of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, she led the development of the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging (CLSA), a 20 year study of 50,000 Canadians aged 45-85. Professor Martin-Matthews’ publications include two books, Aging and Caring at the Intersection of Work and Home Life: Blurring the Boundaries (2008) and Widowhood in Later Life (1991); three edited volumes (on methodology; policy development; and Canadian gerontology in international context); and over 140 papers on health and social care, aging and social support, work – family balance, and rural aging. She served as President of the Research Committee on Aging of the International Sociological Association (2010-2014).

Juliana Martinez Franzoni

Juliana Martínez Franzoni is full professor at the University of Costa Rica. She conducts research on social policy formation and socioeconomic and gender inequality in Latin America. During the past 5 years she has been a Fulbright scholar and a visiting fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies (US), DesiguALdades-net (Germany), CIEPP (Argentina), and the University of Austin (US). Her most recent articles were published in Latin American Research Review (2014), ECLAC Review (2014) and Social Politics (2015). Her most recent book, written with Diego Sánchez-Ancochea, is Building Universal Social Policy in the South: Actors, Ideas and Architectures (Cambridge University Press, 2016). She combines her academic work with policy advocacy and expert advice to governments and international organizations like UN Women and the UN Development Program (UNDP).

Claudia Mora

Claudia Mora is a sociologist and research director of the School of Social Sciences and Humanities at Universidad Andrés Bello in Santiago, Chile. Her research and teaching areas include inequality, gender, labor markets, and migration. Along these lines she has mentored young researchers and chaired more than 30 undergraduate and graduate thesis projects in Chile. Her latest project, funded by FONDECYT, explores class and gender intersections in the Chilean labor market. Her most recent publications include “Intersección Clase-Género y Calidad del Empleo en Chile” (2016), co-authored with Omar Aguilar (corresponding author) and others; “El Matrimonio Homosexual y el Orden de Género” (Editorial Cuarto Propio 2015); and “‘Experts’, the mantra of irregular migration and the reproduction of hierarchies”, a chapter co-authored with J. Handmaker (Cambridge, UK). She edited the book “Desigualdad en Chile: La Continua Relevancia del Género” (Editorial Universidad Alberto Hurtado 2013).

Birgit Pfau-Effinger

Birgit Pfau-Effinger is professor of sociology and research director at the University of Hamburg, Germany, and professor in the Department of Political Science and Public Management of the University of Southern Denmark. Her research interests include the relationship between cultural change and welfare state change; the role of culture and institutions for the explanation of cross-national differences in gender, care and the work-family relationship; diversity of development paths of gender cultures, welfare state policies and the work-family relationship; and the changing relationship between formal and informal work. She has published numerous articles in academic journals as well as several books with leading English-language publishers. One of her articles in Work, Employment, and Society was distinguished in 2012 as “Favorite WES article of the last 25 years” by the British Sociological Association. Her article “Culture and Welfare States. Reflections on a complex interrelation” in the Journal of Social Policy is among the top ten cited articles in the Journal. She had also a leading role in several international research projects, including the ESF Network GIER, the COST A15 Action and the EU Network of Excellence RECWOWE. The German Research Council (DFG) has included her in the database of outstanding women scientists “AcademiaNet”.