Seed grants

Gender Lab Seed Grants

The Gender Lab awards Seed grants to high-quality and innovative PhD student projects annually. Applications are open for economics and finance students at the University of Melbourne.

We encourage students with fairly developed projects that require funding to cover direct research costs to apply for this seed grant. For example, anyone needing funds to cover data access or data collection costs, including paying participants for their participation in surveys or experiments, as well as traveling to conduct field work. The maximum budget for each seed grant is $5,000 AUD.

Introducing 2025's winners

Ruikun Ma is investigating how male-surplus refugee migration in post-WWII Taiwan disrupted traditional kinship structures and fostered more egalitarian gender norms, using newly digitised spatial data on Juancun settlements linked to women’s life-course outcomes.

Maria Elisavet Peppa is studying the effect of family and domestic violence that sexual and gender minorities experience on their economic and mental health outcomes using administrative data from Australia.

Introducing 2024's winners

Renee Zhou is studying whether market access, induced by transportation infrastructure, affected the gender gap in labor market outcomes in China.

In her project, Xinran Hu is seeking to understand how coresidence norms, which guide whose parent(s) a married couple lives with, influence the couple's decision-making.