Programme Director
Department of Political and Social Sciences
Full-time Assistant Professor
Contact info
[email protected]
[+39] 055 4685 653
Personal website
Office
Badia Fiesolana, BF195
Working languages
French, English, Italian
Léa Pessin joined the Department of Political and Social Sciences in September 2024. She is also an external research affiliate at the Population Research Institute at the Pennsylvania State University and at CRIS at Sciences Po. Formerly, she worked as Assistant and Associate Professor of Sociology at The Center for Research in Economics and Statistics (CREST) in ENSAE Paris in 2023-2024, and as Assistant Professor of Sociology and Demography in The Department of Sociology and Criminology at the Pennsylvania State University from 2019 to 2023.Dr. Pessin’s research agenda focuses on the unequal consequences of the gender revolution on women’s work and family outcomes across class, race, and contexts. She applies quantitative methods to cross-national and longitudinal data to explore variation across countries and time. Her work has been published in Demography, Social Forces, The Journal of Marriage and Family, Demographic Research, The European Sociological Review, and The Journal of Personal and Social Relationships. Dr. Pessin received a Ph.D. in Sociology and Demography from Pompeu Fabra University in 2016. She completed an NICHD postdoctoral fellowship at the Population Research Institute at the Pennsylvania State University. She received a Work and Family Researchers Network Early Career Fellowship (2018) as well Pompeu Fabra University’s Extraordinary Doctorate Award (2019). Most recently, Dr. Pessin was awarded an ERC starting grant – WeEqualize– on the intertwined implications of the gender revolution—including changing gender beliefs, rising labor market insecurity, and the increasing retreat from partnerships—in shaping social inequalities in work-family strategies among different-sex couples across 24 countries from the 1960s to nowadays. With her collaborators at Penn State, she is part of a large interdisciplinary NIH-funded R01 grant to study how structural racism shapes racial-ethnic life-course disparities among individuals with end-stage kidney disease.