Dr. Keonhi Son

In May 2024, Keonhi Son started working as a postdoctoral researcher at the MZES in Research Department A.

Keonhi Son received her Ph.D. in political science from the Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences in November 2021. Her research interests lie in the historical political economy of gender and the welfare state. Prior to joining the MZES, she conducted research on the historical development of work–family policies worldwide as a doctoral and postdoctoral researcher at the Collaborative Research Center 1342, “Global Dynamics of Social Policy”. There, she constructed large-scale historical databases measuring maternity, paternity, and parental leave policies from 1883 to 2018 across 165 countries and developed theoretical frameworks to elucidate the adoption and diffusion of leave policies across different world regions. As a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, she also investigated how national growth strategies translate into gender inequality within the labour market as well as the gender configuration of welfare policies in advanced economies during the Fordism Era. Building on her previous work, she is currently expanding the scope of her research to examine the early trajectory of women’s social and economic rights in advanced economics from the late-nineteenth century until the mid-twentieth century and preparing a grant proposal for that purpose. As a course instructor, she has designed and taught seminars at the undergraduate and graduate levels in welfare state research and family sociology. Her teaching interests also include gender theory and social inequality.