معرفی
Ana Catalano Weeks is a Senior Lecturer in Comparative Politics in the Department of Politics, Languages & International Studies (PoLIS) at the University of Bath, where she joined in January 2018. Previously, she was a College Fellow in the Department of Government at Harvard University and a Research Fellow in the Women and Public Policy Program (WAPPP) at the Harvard Kennedy School. She serves as an Editor at Legislative Studies Quarterly, handling comparative politics manuscripts, and from March 2025 will be Lead Co-Editor of the Cambridge University Press book series, Cambridge Studies in Gender & Politics.
Dr. Weeks holds a PhD in Political Science from Harvard University, an MSc in Comparative Politics (Europe) from the London School of Economics, and an AB in Government from Dartmouth College. Her scholarly work has been published in top journals including American Journal of Political Science, American Political Science Review, and Comparative Political Studies. She is actively engaged in supervising PhD students researching gender and politics topics, with particular interest in gender quotas, household inequalities, the mental load, and women in radical right parties.
Her research focuses on gender and politics, political representation, and political parties, with a regional concentration in Western Europe. She has made significant contributions to understanding gender quota laws, the mental load phenomenon, women's representation in cabinets, and the intersection of gender with radical right politics. Her work on the mental load has received widespread media attention, appearing in CBS Mornings and Parents.com, demonstrating how mothers manage approximately 71% of family tasks and 79% of daily routines. She is currently working on projects exploring women in populist radical right parties, femonationalism, public support for gender-egalitarian policies, and the global impacts of gender quota laws.
Dr. Weeks has received numerous prestigious awards for her research, including the 2024 Council for European Studies Carolina de Miguel Moyer Young Scholar Award, the 2023 Best Paper Award from the American Political Science Association's Women, Gender and Politics research section for her work on the political consequences of the mental load, and the 2018 Pi Sigma Alpha / Franklin L. Burdette Prize for her article 'Why Are Gender Quota Laws Adopted by Men? The Role of Inter- and Intraparty Competition.'
She leads and collaborates on several active research projects including 'Experimental Approaches to Studying Gender, Parenthood, and Academic Careers' (2025-2026), 'Role of employer policies in leave decisions – case of the UK Higher Education Sector' (2022-2027), and 'Exploration of drivers of leave decisions of UK parents' (2025-2027). Her research contributes significantly to UN Sustainable Development Goals related to gender equality. Dr. Weeks maintains an active scholarly presence through her Bluesky account (@anacweeks.bsky.social) with 3.9K followers, where she engages with current research on gender and politics.
