Introducing our new postdoc Gabriela Deschamps

Gabreila Deschamps recently joined the Stone Centre family as one of our new postdocs alongside Ossian Prane.

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Gaby spoke with us to share a recap of her research after presenting at the Stone Centre breakfast in December.

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Hi Gaby, thanks for taking the time to speak with us today. Please introduce yourself and tell us about your interest in inequality.

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I have always been interested in understanding social inequality, particularly gender inequality. Because I enjoyed mathematics, my father suggested that economics might be a good fit for me, and that suggestion ended up shaping my path.

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I studied Economics as an undergraduate at ITAM in Mexico City, where I was not initially aware that becoming an academic was even a possible career. Most people around me were lawyers, doctors, or consultants. It was during this time that one of my professors, Levent Ülkü, introduced me to the idea of an academic career and encouraged me to pursue a PhD. This led me to complete my master’s and PhD in Economics at the London School of Economics, where I started working on questions around intimate partner violence and fertility.

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I recently joined the UCL Stone Centre as a postdoctoral researcher, and in September 2026 I will join the University of Gothenburg as an Assistant Professor. I feel very fortunate that my work now allows me to study gender inequality and contribute to thinking about how it can be reduced.

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How will the support of the Stone Centre at UCL help you?

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The Stone Centre's support means I can spend a year without teaching responsibilities, allowing me to fully focus on finishing my job market paper and developing new research projects. Just as importantly, I am surrounded by amazing researchers whose feedback has already impacted my work significantly.

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At the Stone Centre breakfast you presented your job market paper on intimate partner violence. Please tell us more about your research.

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Recent research shows that women are more likely to experience intimate partner violence after becoming mothers. In my paper, I explore why. There are two very different explanations. One is that men become violent after a child is born, for example due to stress or changing household dynamics. The other is that motherhood makes it harder for women to leave abusive relationships, which can increase mothers’ exposure to violence even if men's behaviour does not change after childbirth.

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The challenge is that these two stories look the same in most data. Surveys typically record whether a woman experienced violence recently, but both a woman who left a violent partner and a woman with a non-violent partner would report no current violence. To tell these explanations apart, I need to know not only whether violence happened recently, but also whether it happened in the past and whether the woman stayed in or left the relationship.

Using Mexican survey data that contain this relationship history, I find that motherhood increases women's exposure to violence because it limits their ability to separate, and not because men become violent once they are fathers. I show this by studying what happens when women are able to delay motherhood. In Mexico, the expansion of pharmacies made contraception easier to access, allowing some women to avoid or postpone having a child. When women gain access to a nearby pharmacy, they are less likely to have a child, more likely to leave their partners, and less likely to experience recent violence. The key takeaway is that motherhood can lock women into abusive relationships, and that giving women control over when they become mothers can reduce intimate partner violence by allowing them to exit before having children.

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How do you plan to develop your research in future?

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Looking ahead, I plan to continue researching gender inequality. One ongoing project uses detailed time-use data from multiple countries to better understand the “child penalty” in terms of total time use, not only employment. I am also keen to continue my work on intimate partner violence, with a particular interest in studying interventions that focus on violence prevention.

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Useful links.

Visit Gaby's website.

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