My Research
My Research
Many high-stakes organisational decisions are made by committees, where members exert costly influence to shape a single collective outcome. When committees are gender-imbalanced, the salience of gender identity may affect who mobilises influence and how numerical power translates into effective decision weight. We study how gender-identity salience interacts with numerical power in a controlled laboratory setting using a group-contest design. We vary the numerical balance of power (Female-Majority vs. Male-Majority) and manipulate whether gender composition is revealed. We find larger, advantaged groups invest significantly more, and identity salience has asymmetric effects by gender. Among minority men facing female-majority groups, making gender salient increases investment and their initial disadvantage shrinks over time. Among minority women facing male-majority groups, investment does not increase, and their relative disadvantage grows over time. These divergent responses are not explained by general social preferences or in-group cohesion. The findings suggest highlighting gender identity may intensify mobilisation by minority men without similarly empowering minority women, with implications for the design of diversity and transparency policies.
Over the past decade, more adolescents around the world have sought gender-affirming care, including puberty blockers, which temporarily pause the physical changes of puberty. For transgender youth, whose gender identity differs from the sex assigned to them at birth, this can create more time for assessment and decision-making. Although some short-term mental-health effects have been studied, much less is known about longer-term socioeconomic outcomes.
This study aims to fill that gap using data from the Netherlands, which has the longest-running cohort of transgender individuals who have used puberty blockers. By comparing transgender adolescents who received puberty blockers with those who did not, and with cisgender individuals, the project examines how puberty blockers affect educational achievement, mental health, and early career outcomes. The study uses waiting time until intake as an instrumental variable to estimate causal effects.
The findings could inform clinicians, policymakers, and advocates by clarifying the longer-run consequences of early medical intervention at a time when access to puberty blockers is under intense public and political scrutiny in several countries.
This project asks whether financial distress causes people to discriminate more against others. I test this question using transgender individuals as the target group, since they face substantial stigma and discrimination while remaining an understudied population. Using an online experiment with real monetary stakes, participants first map out their own pay cycle to determine whether they're currently in a financially "secure" or "insecure" moment. A brief writing task then reinforces that mindset. Participants next play an incentivised give-or-take game, making real allocation decisions toward three different people: a man, a woman, and a transgender woman.
Because each participant interacts with all three profiles, the design can isolate whether financial strain specifically affects behaviour toward a transgender target — separate from someone's general generosity or stinginess. The study also measures participants' immediate mood and stress levels, allowing a look at why insecurity might change behaviour: does it work through anxiety and negative emotion, or through more careless, heuristic-driven decision-making?
The project builds on research linking economic pressure to lower tolerance and weaker support for out-groups, but moves beyond attitudes and hypothetical scenarios to real, incentive-compatible behaviour.