Maria Stanfors is Professor of Economic History at Lund University, Sweden. Her research is focused on gender differences in paid and unpaid labour and family formation in past and present times. Currently, she works on emerging gender differences in labour market outcomes (wages, careers, union membership) during industrialization; long-term change in family formation and union dissolution; and gender and time allocation, typically the paid work-unpaid caregiving divide across Europe and North America. In her empirical work, she uses large-scale individual data sets based on historical as well as contemporary surveys or register data applying micro-econometric methods.

Her research has been published in journals such as Economic History Review, Journal of Economic History, Journal of Marriage and Family, European Sociological Review, and Social Science and Medicine.

Maria Stanfors joined IZA as a Research Fellow in July 2020.