Heike Trappe

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Heike Trappe, a research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, is interested in the interrelationship of employment and family responsibilities in women’s and men’s lives, gender inequality in the labor market, and social policy. Her forthcoming article in the Annual Review of Sociology (cowritten with Janet C. Gornick) summarizes the linkage of gender and work in East and West Germany, especially during the period of division, exemplifying how differences across institutional contexts and economic conditions shape gender inequality.

During her Radcliffe fellowship year, Trappe will shift her focus from the time before German reunification to the more recent past. Building on the unique opportunity provided by the unification process, she intends to study the consequences of accelerated social change for gender stratification in both halves of the country. Her goal is to explore whether there’s convergence in the evolution of gender inequality in East and West Germany. She will use comparative life-history data for the study’s empirical part. Theoretically, she aims to advance a concept of different modes of gender stratification.

Trappe held a Max Planck Society doctoral fellowship and earned her PhD in sociology at the Free University in Berlin. Her dissertation on women’s changing life courses in the former East Germany was awarded a Max Planck Society Prize, as well as a related scholarship. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Carolina Population Center of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.