Department of Strategy and Innovation

Sofie Cairo is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Strategy and Innovation at Copenhagen Business School. Before starting her position, Sofie held fellowships at Harvard Business School and at Copenhagen Business School. She studied economics at the University of Copenhagen focusing on behavioral and experimental economics and graduated in 2021 with a dissertation on social benefit policies and labor market performance of jobseekers based on field experiments conducted with the Danish Ministry of Employment.

Her current research agenda focuses on gender inequalities in science, innovation and leadership, such as gender gaps in productivity, promotion and access to funding. Her most recent work studies how the personal situation and characteristics of scientists determine their scientific direction, and how motherhood affects scientific productivity and impact.

To study these topics, Cairo applies state-of-the-art micro-econometric (and machine learning) methods to data panels merging rich bibliometric indicators from Scopus and individual-level administrative registers on socio-demographics, childbearing, education, labor market performance, employer-employee relationships and health. She also conducts surveys and field experiments with science funders such as Novo Nordisk Foundation and the Lundbeck Foundation and with large Danish companies.

Cairo has published in top-field journals in economics, won a number of fellowships from the Carlsberg and SparNord Foundations, and she is currently the Principal Investigator on a project funded by the Lundbeck Foundation focusing on applicant behavior and persistence in science funding.

Cairo is frequently invited to give talks on inequalities in science, e.g., at the Annual meeting of the European Economic Association, at science funder events, and across European universities. She reviews for Labor Economics, Research Policy, and Nature. She organizes professional development workshops at key management conference, such as the Academy of management and DRUID, and she is active as the country coordinator in the REGIS network for young innovation scholars.