Research project of Anne Gielen receives Microdata Access Grant

The Microdata Access Grant offers Anne Gielen the funding for this research project that she will conduct in collaboration with alumnus Esmée Zwiers (University of Amsterdam, Faculty of Economics and Business). The national research infrastructure for the social sciences in the Netherlands ODISSEI (Open Data Infrastructure for Social Science and Economic Innovations), together with Statistics Netherlands (CBS), is making this grant available.

Hormones at work: The impact of (peri)menopause on women’s careers

The share of middle-aged working women has increased over the past decades. This implies that an increasing number of women experience a major biological transition during their working lives: the menopause. Although most women experience various types of physical and mental discomfort in the years around menopause, there is little knowledge about the impact of these symptoms on their careers. 

Anne Gielen says: ‘This research project fills this gap in the literature by studying how experiencing menopausal symptoms influences the labour market and health outcomes of women in the years around menopause. To causally identify these effects, Esmée and I use two sources of naturally occurring variation. First, we exploit variation in the age at menopause across women. Second, we use variation in hormone replacement therapy (HRT) treatment due to controversy in the early 2000s that was alleviated in 2017. This project will provide important results to bolster gender equality in the labor market.’

Conducting Research with CBS microdata

CBS collects a wide range of data for its statistical tasks, many of them microdata at the level of individual persons or organisations. Protection of the confidentiality of the data has the highest priority for CBS. Within strict safety conditions however, universities and other authorised research institutes can get Remote Access to such data to perform statistical analyses for their own scientific or statistical purposes. The microdata themselves remain strictly within a secure environment within CBS. Under applicable conditions researcher can also bring in additional dataset to be linked with CBS microdata. Before aggregate statistical results are exported from the secured environment, CBS will check whether these results do not contain any risk for disclosure of information on individual persons or organisations.