Judith C. Koops

Dr. Judith C. Koops is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI-KNAW) and serves as Executive Secretary for the European Association for Population Studies. She is Principal Investigator of the project "Unintended births and the motherhood penalty" and has established herself as a leading researcher in demographic studies focusing on family formation and transitions to parenthood.

Dr. Koops completed her PhD in 2020 at the University of Groningen with a dissertation titled "Understanding nonmarital childbearing: the role of socio-economic background and ethnicity in Europe and North-America."

Her research focuses on family formation, transition to parenthood, unintended births, inequality over the life course, and cross-national patterns. Utilizing quantitative methods, she examines how socio-economic factors influence demographic behavior, particularly in the context of single motherhood and nonmarital fertility across Western societies. Her work bridges sociology and demography to understand how family structures evolve in different cultural and economic contexts.

Dr. Koops' publication record demonstrates consistent engagement with cutting-edge demographic research, particularly examining socio-economic differences in family formation patterns across 18 Western societies. Her work frequently employs cross-national comparative approaches using data from the Generations and Gender Survey and other large-scale demographic datasets. Recent publications increasingly focus on unintended pregnancies and their labor market consequences, reflecting her current project on the "motherhood penalty."

• Microdata Access Grant (2024) for examining the influence of birth intention on labor market outcomes
• Instituut Gak-KNAW grant (2023)
• Fellowship of the Demographic Resilience Programme (2022)
• DANS Small Data Projects Grant (2020)

Dr. Koops has served in significant research management roles including as Data Manager of the Generations and Gender Programme, Coordinator of the Harmonized Histories project, and Task Leader for the Social Sciences & Humanities Open Cloud project. Her current project "Unintended births and the motherhood penalty" investigates how birth intentions affect women's labor market outcomes in the Netherlands and Europe.