Ivana Dobrotić is an Associate Professor of Comparative Social Policy at the Department of Social Policy at the Social Work Study Centre of the Faculty of Law, University of Zagreb and an Associate Member at the Department of Social Policy and Intervention at the University of Oxford. Her research interests lie in the field of comparative social policy, with a particular interest in work-care policies, gender, social and spatial inequalities. She is the principal investigator at the Horizon Europe project rEUsilience: Risks, Resources and Inequalities: Increasing Resilience in European Families and the leader of the WG5 Sustainable PPL data at the COST project Parental Leave Policies and Social Sustainability (Sustainability@Leave). She is a Steering Committee member of the ECPR Standing Group on Gender and Politics, a co-editor of the Annual Review of Leave Policies & Related Research and an associate editor at European Societies.
She holds a PhD in sociology from the University of Ljubljana (Slovenia) and a Master in Social Work from the University of Zagreb (Croatia). She is continuously attending professional training programs, especially in comparative and qualitative methodology at the methodology schools of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) and at the University of Oxford. In the period between 2018 and 2021, she was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellow at the University of Oxford as a PI of the InCARE project investigating parenting leaves and ECEC policies’ development in post-Yugoslav countries with a particular focus on parents in precarious employment. Before joining the University of Zagreb (in the period between 2003 and 2007), she worked as an expert at the Croatian ministry and was in charge of poverty and social inclusion policies and gender equality. She has also worked on Croatia’s accession to the EU.
Since 2010, she has been an active member of International Network on Leave Policies & Research, where she is also acting as one of the editors of Annual Review of Leave Policies & Related Research, that covers around 50 countries worldwide. Since 2021, she has been a Steering Committee member of the ECPR Standing Group Gender & Politics. Since 2017, she has been actively involved in the work of PhD school EUSOC Interdisciplinary International School of Postgraduate Studies of the Social Sciences at the Masaryk University as an Advisory Board member and supervisor. From 2022, she has been an associate editor of European Societies, and from 2012 to 2018, she was the executive editor of the Croatian Journal of Social Policy, where she has remained as a member of the editorial board until today. In addition, she is a member of the editorial board of the scientific journals European Journal of Social Security, The Social Policy Forum and Croatian Annals of Social Work. She is a member of the international editorial board of the journal Teorija in praksa (Theory and Practice) (Slovenia) and the Journal of Social Policy (N. Macedonia).
She has been extensively involved in policymaking activities at the national and EU level, aiming to improve parents’ and children’s rights, advising and collaborating with ministries and other stakeholders (e.g., European Commission, European Institute for Gender Equality – EIGE, UNICEF). Among other things, she has been a member of the EU Social Protection Committee working group Work-life Balance Indicators and has led a team developing the blueprint report for addressing child poverty and social exclusion in Croatia and informing the EU Child Guarantee implementation. She has initiated the initiative Every Child Has a Right to a School Meal (Pravo svakog djeteta na školski obrok) in Croatia, with the goal of ensuring that every child in primary schools gets one free school meal a day. For this initiative, together with her colleagues Olja Družić Ljubotina, Marijana Kletečki and Antonija Petričušić, she received several awards: a special award from the Croatian Association of Social Workers (2022); recognition “Krunoslav Sukić” for the promotion of peacemaking, non-violence and human rights (2023); Croatian Women of Influence Award 2023 and the Award of the City of Zagreb (2023).
She collaborates in numerous research projects, mostly focused on various topics in the field of social policy, she has participated in numerous conferences, and published extensively in local and international journals and books. Her work has been published in journals such as Journal of European Social Policy; Social Politics; European Societies, Social Policy & Administration; European Journal of Politics and Gender; Journal of International and Comparative Social Policy; Journal of Contemporary European Studies; Europe-Asia Studies; International Journal of Sociology & Social Policy; and Southeast European and Black Sea Studies. She is the editor of Edward Elgar Research Handbook on Leave Policy: Parenting and Social Inequalities in a Global Perspective as well as special issues on work-care policies and inequalities in journals: International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, Social Inclusion and Revija za socijalnu politiku (Journal of Social Policy).
