“I have not yet come across many books in which gender identity plays a major role”, PhD student in health economics Elisa de Weerd says. At the same time, she is modest enough to admit that the books might be out there and that she has simply not come across them very often. She recently read Lentekind, Harmen van Liemt’s debut novel. It is about a boy, Woody, who grows up in a loving family in the eastern part of the country. His sister falls ill and dies, while Woody gradually discovers his homosexuality. “He has a close-knit family. In this story, you can read how a warm nest can help when someone is struggling with their sexuality. This can also be found in scientific literature. Family ties are important for someone who is hesitant about their gender identity”, says De Weerd.
Reading habits
Number of books per year: 25
Last book read: Fire by John Boyne
Primary motivation: Enrichment. Seeing the world from someone else’s eyes and turning our mind off.
Favourite genre: Literary novels. “I often read two books at the same time. A fiction book and a non-fiction book. By the time I have read one non-fiction book, I will have finished five fiction books.”
Sexual identity versus gender identity
De Weerd researches careers of transgender people, an area that is relatively uncharted territory. “In our research, we often still use literature from the field of sexual identity. There is still little scientific literature on gender identity. Trends around sexual identity and gender identity may be similar, but there are also many differences.”
Transgender people going into transition often have to go through concrete steps, such as a name change, hormone treatment or surgery. Such obvious changes do not usually occur in people who are attracted to the same sex. Pioneering in a relatively new field of research is precisely what appeals to De Weerd. “The outcomes are a surprise. There is still a lot that we don’t know, so the research is about the big questions and not about refining a specific parameter.”
Men's salary versus women's
De Weerd works with Dutch data from Statistics Netherlands (CBS). She can find a lot of information in these data, such as when someone underwent a medical transition or when their gender was adjusted in their passport. On the other hand, there is no mention of whether someone wants to be addressed with neutral pronouns. After sometimes spending weeks browsing the data to identify the right and relevant codes, she is now finetuning her analyses.
She can already give a small taste of her findings. “People who transition from male to female see their income, on average, go down. Conversely, we see no change in income after a transition from female to male”, De Weerd says. Is the transition more intense? Do people begin working in other sectors after their transition? Does discrimination play a role? People may also have started working fewer hours. She cannot yet pinpoint a specific reason, but it is striking. At the same time, this trend is consistent with research from the United States.
The US is not the Netherlands
De Weerd chooses her words carefully when the US comes up. Now that research into the LGBTQ+ community is under pressure there, a relatively new field of research threatens to be nipped in the bud, and words like ‘gender’, ‘LGBT’ and ‘biologically male’ are now considered undesirable by the government. “Things are pretty tense”, De Weerd says. “But I work in the Netherlands with Dutch data”, she adds with determination.
She does not allow developments in the US to influence her course. She does find it worrying if questions related to gender identity or sexual identity are no longer asked in surveys on the other side of the Atlantic ocean. “Not just for the current period either, as it would create a permanent gap in the data. This will also affect research in the future.”
Prior to the politically troubled times, she was in the United States, as one of her copromotors works at Cornell University in New York. Far away from family and friends, she expected to be reading a lot. However, it became a period of a lot of talking and new encounters. This is something De Weerd appreciates about her work in science: “For me, visiting conferences is one of the most enjoyable things to do.”
Reading is her big hobby, though. She founded a book club both during her time as a bachelor student of economics in Utrecht and at the start of her doctoral programme at Erasmus University. Reading gives her the opportunity to turn her mind off for a while, but paradoxically, she cannot pick up a book if she has too much on her mind. This was the case during her months in America.
Elisa de Weerd is a PhD student in health economics at Erasmus School of Economics. Since February 2025, she also works as a postdoctoral researcher at Radboud University in Nijmegen. As a freelance editor, she is involved with ESB economics magazine and has made three seasons of the podcast Nieuwe Economen. In that capacity, she has interviewed PhD students about their research in the field of economics.
