Daisy Pollenne

I am a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Organisational Behaviour area at INSEAD, jointly affiliated with the Stone Centre for the Study of Wealth Inequality and the INSEAD Gender Initiative. I hold a DPhil in Social Anthropology from the University of Oxford.

My research examines how organizations shape employee well-being, retention, and careers, and how organizational processes contribute to broader social and labor market inequalities. I am particularly interested in understanding, when organizations intervene to improve working conditions, what do those interventions actually change—and for whom?

In current research, I study how flexible work arrangements shape women's employment, showing that flexibility is associated more strongly with remaining with an employer than with remaining in paid work itself. This shifts attention from whether organizations retain women to how they shape the organizations in which workers build their careers. In related work, I examine how the employment adjustments associated with parenthood shape the gender pay gap and employee well-being, connecting organizational processes to outcomes that unfold across careers and the labor market.

Alongside this, my research agenda asks how organizational processes are interpreted, implemented, and distributed. For instance, I study how managers and teams translate organizational practices into employees' experiences, including why the same flexible-work request can produce different outcomes depending on who makes it, and when interventions intended to improve participation and inclusion succeed or fail. With colleagues, I am also reconstructing the Flex Index, a firm-level database of work arrangements, to examine how organizations structure and absorb alternative work arrangements over time.

Across these projects, I seek to understand how organizations can shape work in ways that improve employee well-being and organizational performance without reproducing the inequalities they are intended to address.

I welcome opportunities to collaborate on questions at the intersection of work, well-being, and inequality.