Richard Zijdeman

Richard L. Zijdeman obtained his PhD at the Interuniversity Center for Social Science Theory and Methodology

(ICS), Utrecht University in 2010. His main research focuses on social stratification structures and how and why people are moving across these structures (mobility / status attainment). He thereby focuses specifically on the issue of how technological changes (e.g. industrialization, internet, means of transportation) facilitate opportunities or raise barriers for such movements. Currently the focus of his research is on gender segregation and female labour force participation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

In his research, Zijdeman uses quantitative sources with occupational data: mainly digitalized personal records such as marriage records, as well as digitalized register data, such as censuses. In order to understand the influence of technological change he also uses detailed regional data on technological innovations.

Zijdeman is a (part-time) postdoctoral fellow at the CLIO-INFRA project

at the International Institute of Social History. He is also an Honorary Research Fellow at the Department of Applied Social Science of the University of Stirling and co-founder of the international academic collaboratory HISCO. He is involved in several research projects, e.g. the project "Towards Open Societies" and the HIS-CAM-project

Richard Zijdeman has joined the research team of the ERC-project "United We Stand" at Utrecht University to work on issues of household formation and marriage patterns.