Heidi Hartmann, Ph.D., President and CEO

Heidi Hartmann is the President of the Washington-based Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR), a scientific research organization that she founded in 1987 to meet the need for women-centered, policy-oriented research. She is an economist with a B.A. from Swarthmore College and M. Phil and Ph.D. degrees from Yale University, all in economics. Dr. Hartmann is also a Research Professor at The George Washington University.

Dr. Hartmann lectures internationally on women, economics, and public policy; frequently testifies before the U.S. Congress; and is often cited as an authority in various media outlets, such as CNN, ABC News, The New York Times, and PBS NewsHour. She has published numerous articles in journals and books and her work has been translated into more than a dozen languages. She is a co-author of several IWPR reports, including Women’s and Men’s Employment and Unemployment in the Great Recession; Still A Man’s Labor Market: The Long-Term Earnings Gap; Unnecessary Losses: Costs to Americans of the Lack of Family and Medical Leave; Equal Pay for Working Families, and Strengthening Social Security for Women. She also serves as Secretary/Treasurer of the National Council of Women’s Organizations and Editor of the Journal of Women, Politics & Policy, and served as the Chair of the Board of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.

Prior to founding IWPR, Dr. Hartmann was on the faculties of Rutgers University and the New School for Social Research and worked at the National Research Council/National Academy of Sciences and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. In 1994, Dr. Hartmann was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship Award for her work in the field of women and economics. She is the recipient of two honorary degrees.

Cynthia Hess, Ph.D., Study Director

Cynthia Hess has worked for IWPR since 2007. She has served as study director for IWPR projects on numerous issues, including the status of women in the states, women’s activism and leadership, immigration, and Social Security. Prior to joining the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, Dr. Hess taught for two years as a visiting faculty member in the Philosophy and Religious Studies Department at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. Her scholarly work has focused on the intersection of feminist theory, theology, and peace studies, and her publications include Sites of Violence, Sites of Grace: Christian Nonviolence and the Traumatized Self as well as articles on terrorism, traumatic violence, and religious peacemaking. Dr. Hess received her Ph.D. from Yale University and her A.B. from Davidson College.

Ariane Hegewisch, Study Director

Ariane Hegewisch has been a Study Director at IWPR since the summer of 2008; prior to that she spent two years at IWPR as a scholar-in-residence. She came to IWPR from the Center for WorkLife Law at UC Hastings. She is responsible for IWPR’s research on workplace discrimination and is a specialist in comparative human resource management, with a focus on policies and legislative approaches to facilitate greater work life reconciliation and gender equality, in the US and internationally. Prior to coming to the USA she taught comparative European human resource management at Cranfield School of Management in the UK where she was a founding researcher of the Cranet Survey of International HRM, the largest independent survey of human resource management policies and practices, covering 25 countries worldwide. She started her career in local economic development, developing strategies for greater gender equality in employment and training in local government in the UK. She has published many papers and articles and co-edited several books, including ‘Women, work and inequality: The challenge of equal pay in a deregulated labour market”. She is German and has a BSc in Economics from the London School of Economics and an MPhil in Development Studies from the IDS, Sussex.

Barbara Gault, Ph.D., Vice President and Executive Director

Barbara Gault, Ph.D., is the Executive Director and Vice President of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. Since joining the Institute in 1997 she has focused on a wide range of issues of importance to women and their families, including poverty, access to education, health, work-life balance, political engagement, and the need for expanded preschool and child care options for working parents. Her publications include Improving Child Care Access to Promote Postsecondary Success Among Low-Income Parents, Resilient and Reaching for More: Challenges and Benefits of Higher Education for Welfare Participants and Their Children, “The Costs and Benefits of Policies to Advance Work Life Integration” as well as The Price of School Readiness: A Tool for Estimating the Cost of Universal Preschool in the States; and Working First But Working Poor: The Need for Education and Training Following Welfare Reform. She has testified in Congress on low-income women’s educational access, has spoken on women’s issues in venues throughout the country including at White House sponsored events, and appears in a range of print, radio and television media outlets. Prior to joining IWPR, Dr. Gault conducted research at the Office of Children’s Health Policy Research, and served as a staff and board member of organizations promoting human rights in Latin America. She received her Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of Pennsylvania and her B.A. from the University of Michigan. She serves on the Board of Directors of the Coalition on Human Needs, and is a Research Professor of Women’s Studies at the George Washington University.

Jeffrey Hayes, Ph.D., Study Director

Jeff joined IWPR in September 2009, and he works on projects examining women’s and men’s employment, job quality, and economic security over the life course. He is currently analyzing access and usage of paid leave in the U.S. and contributing to the Status of Women in the States project. Prior to joining IWPR, Jeff worked at the McGill Institute for Health and Social Policy and the Harvard Project on Global Working Families, analyzing how labor conditions affect children’s health and development around the world, and he taught research methods at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He holds master’s and Ph.D. degrees in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a bachelor’s degree in Sociology and Religious Studies from the University of Virginia.

Jessica Milli, Ph.D., Senior Research Associate

Dr. Jessica Milli joined IWPR in September 2013 as a consultant and came on board full-time in May 2014. She currently works primarily on issues relating to paid sick leave, including estimating access rates and the costs and benefits of such policies. Prior to joining IWPR, Jessica taught courses in economics, including economic statistics, labor economics, and women in the global economy at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, and Randolph College. She holds bachelor’s, master’s, and Ph.D. degrees in Economics from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where she conducted research examining the link between the experience of domestic violence, welfare receipt, and employment status of women as well as research that attempted to explain the persistent educational attainment gap between white students and minority students. Jessica’s research interests include welfare, domestic violence, paid family leave, paid sick leave, and women’s education.