gender pay gap, female labor force participation, internal migration, climate change

Hanna Schwank is an Assistant Professor of Economic History at the University of Bonn. She received her PhD in Economics from Boston University in 2022.

What is the best thing about your job?

What I really appreciate is the flexibility and autonomy: I can work on the issues that interest me and that I consider relevant. I can even, to a certain extent, choose the people I work with on these issues. This is something that makes the job really great and exceptional.

What fascinates you about your research topic?

Ultimately, the topics that interest me in economics and specifically in my research are topics that I believe are very relevant to people in their everyday lives and the way they shape their lives. I work on big questions like migration or what to do if you are affected by a natural disaster. Another research topic of mine is the gender wage gap and women in the labour market, where historically there have been and still are big differences. Knowing where these come from is super important in order to understand how women’s employment biographies and economic opportunities differ from those of men today.

If you had not gone into research, what would you be doing today?

I used to want to be a journalist, but then I realised that I would rather dedicate more time to a project. Today, I would probably work in politics, either in an international organisation or in a political institution in Germany.

When was the last time you had to change your mind?

As a scientist, I am of course constantly learning. This can lead to an assumption that I previously had being corrected – but I don’t know if I would call that changing my mind. Rather, I tend to change my mind in my semi-professional and private life. If I’m not very well informed about political events and only have a vague opinion, it often changes as soon as I read more about it.

Which advice would you have needed yourself as a doctoral student?

As a doctoral student, I received lots of good advice – one of the advantages of the structured doctoral programmes. One piece of advice that I perhaps needed even more was to rely on and trust my own abilities. You learn a lot about how to question things critically, and that’s important. But that can lead to you taking an extremely critical view of your own research and no longer being able to see the good you’re actually doing.