Dr Catherine Hakim is a social scientist and a Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Policy Studies, London. Her publications include over 100 papers published in British, European and American refereed academic journals and edited collections, four textbooks, and over a dozen books and monographs on the labour market, changing patterns of employment and working time, women’s employment and women’s position in society, occupational segregation and the pay gap, self-employment and small firms, social engineering, models of the family, work orientations and lifestyle preferences, changing social attitudes, voluntary childlessness, social and family policy, research design, social statistics and cross-national comparative research in all these fields.
Research interests include:
- Trends in sexuality and the rising importance of erotic capital, especially for women. Initial reports on Erotic Capital in the European Sociological Review (see PDF) and Times Higher Education (see PDF) have been extended into a book published in Britain (Penguin), the USA (Basic Books) and Germany (Campus Verlag). Further translations are planned for 2012 in Spain (Debate), Italy (Mondadori), Brazil (Record), Korea, Japan and other countries.
- Preference theory and its application in research and social policy across Europe. Consonant with complexity theory, preference theory identifies diverse outcomes from common starting points. Social scientists around the globe have confirmed the central classification of lifestyle choices (see Table 3 attached) and are exploring its application within their countries, in studies of fertility and employment.
- Women’s employment and the relative importance of lifestyle choices versus other factors in explaining the continuing and stable pay gap and other sex differences in European labour market outcomes. Her book Key Issues in Women’s Work sets out the issues and evidence to date, in advanced economies and China. She has contributed to debates on female quotas for company boards and gender equality indexes. Her Centre for Policy Studies report on Feminist Myths and Magic Medicine offers a critique of the claims made for the success of Scandinavian social policies – see PDF file
- Attitudes to fertility and (voluntary) childlessness. Her comparative study of childlessness across Europe remains unique and topical. See Childlessness in Europe
Photo: Charles Shearn