Stephanie Steinmetz
Stephanie Steinmetz is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Lausanne and Amsterdam where she is a member of the Life Course and Inequality Centre (LIVES) and FORS. Her research focuses on educational and labour market vulnerabilities from a cross-national and intersectional perspective. Currently, she is the PI of PROFEM (2022-2027) a ERC approved project which focuses on female immigrant’s integration into host societies. Moreover, she is Secretary General of the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP), which collects comparative survey data in over 40 countries worldwide. Her work has been published in international journals such as the European Sociological Review, Work, Employment and Society, Social Forces, Comparative Social Research, the International Journal of Comparative Sociology and Social Politics.
Jil Zanolin
Jil Zanolin is a PhD candidate at the Swiss Centre of Expertise in Life Course Research (LIVES) at the University of Lausanne. She holds a Master’s degree in Socioeconomics and a Bachelor’s degree in International Relations from the University of Geneva. Her research examines social inequalities in education, with a particular focus on how gender and migration background intersect in shaping life-course trajectories. In her doctoral project, she studies educational segregation across countries with different institutional structures, investigating how stratified school systems contribute to unequal transitions and long-term outcomes. By combining cross-national comparative data with advanced quantitative methods, she analyzes how educational systems structure intersectional inequalities over time.
Mattia Guarnerio
Mattia Guarnerio is a PhD candidate in Sociology who combines advanced quantitative methods with a commitment to documenting processes of cumulative disadvantage and informing policies for labour market equality. After completing a B.A. in Sociology at the University of Trento (2022) and an M.Res. in Social Sciences at the University of Amsterdam (2024), he joined the PROFEM team at the University of Lausanne (UNIL) to study how gender and migration status intersect in shaping wage hierarchies. His doctoral thesis investigates whether and how the intersectional gender‑migration composition of occupations drives over-time and cross-national wage penalties across European and comparable high-income countries.
Thea Rebien
Thea Rebien is a PhD candidate at the Swiss Centre of Expertise in Life Course Research (LIVES) at the University of Lausanne. Her research background is in labour market inequalities related to sex and migration background. Thea holds a BSc in Political Science (2023) and an MSc in Social Science Research (2025), both with distinction, from the University of Amsterdam. During her studies, she has been an intern on the EqualStrength project and worked as a student assistant with Dutch registry data. In the PROFEM project, her research explores organisational diversity policies and European Diversity Charters from a mixed-methods approach, combining semi-structured interviews with survey experimental designs.