Dr. Anat Herbst-Debby specialize in a number of research fields: gender aspects of welfare policies; gender aspects of the social security system; old-age pensions; families undergoing change; motherhood and adolescent employment. In the past decade, her scientific work has focused on inequality within four main areas: welfare-to-work programs and mothers’ employment; family changes, divorce and inequality; adolescent employment and old-age pension rights.

First, she investigated mothers in welfare-to-work programs, which seek to deepen the integration of women into the paid labor market. The target population of the specific program she examined is mothers from socio-economically vulnerable groups, most of whom have been outside the paid labor market for long periods of time, have never been integrated in the market, or have been partially or temporarily integrated. The main target groups of this program are mothers falling into the following ethnic categories: immigrants from the former Soviet Union (mainly, from the Caucasus, Uzbekistan and Bukhara), immigrants from Ethiopia, Israeli-Palestinians and Mizrachi women (veteran Israeli Jews who are first- or second-generation immigrants from Asia and North Africa).

Second research project deals with inequality and divorce, examining the relation between various aspects of family life and inequality. The importance of this study is that, in many parts of the world, especially in countries considered economically developed, the traditional structure of the family unit has been facing new challenges. These include increased labor-market participation of women in general, and mothers in particular; the expansion of women’s academic education; rising divorce rates; and changes in the structure of the family.

A third research project she is currently working on deals with gender aspects of pension rights, for which she won an Impact grant for the study. A fourth area of research that she is currently working on is adolescent employment in the context of family change, she won a grant from the Israel Science Foundation for this project.