Sofie Cairo

Sofie Cairo is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Strategy and Innovation at Copenhagen Business School and a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Chair for Entrepreneurship at the University of Zürich since September 2024. She holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Copenhagen (2021), with a dissertation focused on social benefit policies and labor market performance based on field experiments conducted with the Danish Ministry of Employment.

Her research primarily investigates gender inequalities in science, innovation and leadership, with particular focus on motherhood penalties in academic careers. Cairo has documented that mothers suffer 25 percentage point penalties on annual scientific publication output compared to fathers in the first seven years after childbirth, with 16% lower research publishing participation. Her methodology combines state-of-the-art micro-econometric and machine learning techniques applied to rich datasets merging bibliometric indicators from Scopus with individual-level administrative registers.

Cairo's work has been published in top-field journals including the Journal of Public Economics and Academy of Management Proceedings. She has secured significant funding including a Principal Investigator role on a Lundbeck Foundation project and fellowships from the Carlsberg and SparNord Foundations. Her research has important implications for science policy, academic institutions, and gender equality initiatives.

She is frequently invited to present at major conferences including the European Economic Association Annual Meeting and organizes professional development workshops at the Academy of Management and DRUID conferences. Cairo serves as the country coordinator in the REGIS network for young innovation scholars and reviews for journals including Labor Economics, Research Policy, and Nature.