Kea Tijdens

Kea Tijdens (1951) studied sociology and psychology at the State University of Groningen. She holds a doctorate degree in sociology (1989).

Currently, she is research coordinator at the Amsterdam Institute of Labor Studies and Professor of Women and Employment at the Department of Sociology, Erasmus University Rotterdam. She held visiting fellowships at the London School of Economics, University of South Australia and University of Essex. She published several books and contributed articles to Feminist Economics, Journal of Family Issues (with Tanja van der Lippe and Esther de Ruijter), Information & Management (with Pascale Peters and Cecile Wetzels), Acta Sociologica, New Technology, Work and Employment (with Bram Steijn) and Economic and Industrial Democracy (with Maarten van Klaveren). She has co-ordinated several research projects in the field of industrial relations, among which the collective agreements database in the Netherlands, and she performed several industry-specific studies, among others in IT, cleaning, banking, metalworking, municipalities, and among occupational groups such as secretaries.

In 2000, together with Paulien Osse, she funded the continuous web-based Wage Indicator Survey in the Netherlands, which is currently operational in 12 countries and soon in 17 (www.wageindicator.org).

She is also co-ordinator of EUROCUPATIONS and of WOLIWEB, both EU-FP6 funded projects aiming to develop a occupations database, respectively to examine the socio-economic determinants of citizens’ work life attitudes, preferences and perceptions, using data from the European Wage Indicator Survey.

Her current research interests include the gendered structures in organisations, gender-based wage differentials, household’s outsourcing behaviour, working time related issues, work-life policies in firms, and the upgrading and downgrading of occupations.