New Visiting PhD Fellow › view all

We are pleased to announce that Julie Reppen Brattsti, PhD candidate in social psychology at the University of Inland Norway, has joined BIGSSS as a Visiting PhD Fellow until May 2026. She specializes in the cross-cultural measurement of gender equality, with a focus on how the concept can be defined and assessed in more comprehensive and culturally sensitive ways.

 Julie has a background in psychology and social psychology. She completed her B.Sc. in Psychology at the University of Inland Norway and her M.Sc. in Social Psychology at the University of Edinburgh. Her research examines how gender (in)equality can be conceptualized and measured across cultural contexts, particularly in ways that capture its multidimensional nature, including men’s inequalities and horizontal gender equality. This forms the core of her doctoral project. Beyond this work, she is also interested in partner preferences across cultures and in how different forms of sexual objectification—self, other, and partner—relate to women’s sexual well-being. 

Research Collaboration at BIGSSS 

During her fellowship at BIGSSS, Julie is working with Prof. Klaus Boehnke on a project titled “The Meaning of Gender Equality Across Cultures.” Building on Boehnke’s work on measurement equivalence (American Psychologist, 2022), the project investigates whether perceptions of gender equality can be measured comparably across cultures using semantically varied indicators. By doing so, it seeks to understand how different cultural contexts operationalize gender equality and to assess whether existing measurement approaches adequately capture cross-cultural diversity.

We warmly welcome Julie to BIGSSS and look forward to the valuable contributions her research will bring to the academic community