Max Planck Summer School for Women in Political Economy

September 22–25, 2025 | Cologne

The problem of underrepresentation exists at all levels of the discipline, from doctoral students to professors, but mostly becomes acute at the postdoctoral level, since many qualified and talented women who have earned a PhD in Political Economy or a related discipline leave academia and choose not to pursue an academic career. Often they lack both role models and a network in the discipline.

In the spirit of its inaugural installment in 2023, the Second Max Planck Summer School for Women in Political Economy will attempt to address some of these issues. Hosted by the MPIfG, it aims to establish a European network of women working in political economy and to contribute to ameliorating existing gendered inequalities in the field.

The Summer School is intended to be an inclusive event and explicitly welcomes women, non-binary people, and all people of marginalized genders. It is open to current PhD students or recent PhD graduates who work in comparative and international political economy or related fields. It will bring junior scholars together with established scholars in the field who will act as the main instructors. The program will combine four strands:

1. Substantive sessions on the state of the art in different subfields in political economy taught by senior scholars, allowing participants to gain familiarity with different subfields and current debates. The indicative list of topics covered includes the political economy of comparative capitalism, financialization, geoeconomics, climate change, and political inequality.
2. Work-in-progress sessions, giving participants the chance to receive feedback on work in progress or their research design.
3. Professional development sessions, focusing on science as a profession, giving participants the chance to develop practical skills and acquire useful knowledge relevant to their academic career.
4. Sessions centered around sharing experiences of navigating a male-dominated field as women, the possible strategies to address the challenges this can pose, as well as potential avenues towards the transformation of unequal gendered dynamics in the field.

We envisage several outcomes arising from the program and benefiting participants and the field as a whole: intellectual exchange, professional and skills development, and forging of professional and personal networks and informal mentoring relationships to facilitate equal participation and career progression in the field of political economy.