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Meet Our Students: the Best Poster Prize at the RES 25 Conference for Sofiana Sinani

21 July, 2025

What if parental leave policies shape more than just short-term labor outcomes? Sofiana Sinani offed some answers and got a price for them, as she explains in the interview.

While much of the existing research focuses on how such policies impact parents' careers, Sofiana Sinani, winner of the Best Poster Prize at the Royal Economic Society Conference 2025, took a different angle:How do extended periods of maternal care influence children’s future aspirations — especially their choice of university studies and careers?

Her project examines a 1995 policy change in the Czech Republic, where mothers were offered the option to extend their leave beyond the standard job-protection period. The results are following: boys exposed to longer maternal care were significantly less likely to apply to stereotypically “female” fields, such as education or healthcare. The research suggests that parental leave doesn’t just affect today’s workforce — it can shape the beliefs and ambitions of the next generation. In this interview, we explore the project that earned Sofiana Sinani the Best Poster Prize at the Royal Economic Society Conference 2025.

The key takeaways from Sofiana Sinani’s project:

• Policy: In 1995, the Czech Republic offered mothers the option to extend their leave by one year beyond their job-protection period, opting into temporary unemployment.
• Research question: Does being exposed to a stay-at-home mother for longer during childhood affect children’s occupation preferences?
• Main result: Boys exposed to longer maternal care applied less to traditionally “female” university fields (e.g., education and healthcare programs). I see no effect on daughters.
• Mechanism: The shift isn’t driven by changes in academic ability, but possibly by intra-household transmission of gender norms.

Sofiana Sinani explains the mechanism she described in her winning poster at the Royal Economic Society 2025 conference as follows: “Mothers who took the extended leave spent at least one more year at home, reinforcing their role as primary caregivers. To investigate whether the mother’s labor market inactivity transmitted gendered preferences for occupations, I look at the field-of-study university applications, and define programs as stereotypically female (male) if they had a historical female graduation rate above (below) 80 (20) percent. I find that when the affected children applied to university, the boys in these cohorts were significantly less likely to choose fields that are stereotypically “female.” I find no change for girls, indicating that while longer maternal care can reshape boys’ views of gendered occupations, girls’ preferences are not easily malleable. So, beyond the usual debates over costs and labor market effects, my findings confirm a meaningful benefit of parental leave extensions: they can help redefine gender norms for the next generation.”

Read the full interview with Sofiana Sinani in English on the CERGE-EI Blog.