Growing up in the former communist country of Albania, Associate Professor Elvira Sojli has always been interested in understanding and studying finance. She was particularly interested in pursuing a career in Australia, so when she was offered a position as a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Banking and Finance at the University of New South Wales Business School in 2016, Elvira accepted the job without even visiting Sydney.
Fortunately, the move lived up to her high expectations and she was promoted to Associate Professor in 2018, appointed Head of the Digital Finance CRC in 2017, became Chair of the Australian Financial Research Network (FIRN) in 2021, and subsequently became Chair of the Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Committee and Associate Dean (Equity, Diversity and Inclusion) from 2022-2024.
Throughout her extensive research career, Prof. Sojli has observed significant disparities between men and women in how innovation is funded around the world, and she wants to break down the societal barriers that tell women they don't have a future in fields like finance.
Her participation as a faculty mentor and academic leader in UNSW Business School’s annual Girls in Business Camp is helping to make this happen for future women in finance.
The UNSW Business School EDI team caught up with Associate Professor Sojli to find out more about her career and why students who identify as women should consider a career in finance.
Have you always been interested in banking and finance?
Believe it or not, I have always been interested in finance since I was a child. I was born and raised in Albania, so I spent most of my childhood in a communist, so-called “planned economy.” When the government changed, I became more interested in understanding how money circulates, how decisions about money are made, etc. That's where my interest began.
How did you get into this field of research?
When I was an undergraduate there were no degrees in banking or finance so I went to the UK and did an undergraduate degree in accounting and finance at the London School of Economics and Political Science, then did a Masters in Economics and Finance at the University of Warwick, and finally combined the fields of economics and finance by doing a PhD on the financial aspects of exchange rates.
Did you have any female role models that helped pave the way for you?
My mother was an accountant and the financial equivalent of communism/planned economy, so her job brought an understanding and interest in finance into the household. She influenced me to study this field. All of my math teachers were incredible women, as were my physics and chemistry teachers. I was very inspired by these smart women and looked up to them all. I wanted to follow in their footsteps.
Can you tell us about your research interests?
My research has changed over time. My PhD was on exchange rates, but it led me to become interested in other market securities such as stocks and bonds. After working in the field for almost 10 years, I felt like I had nothing left to learn and discover.
So after discussing the topic with a colleague at the National University of Singapore, I have been studying innovation at an economic level in firms and industries for the past seven years. How do companies decide what type of innovation to invest in, what product types to pursue, etc.? Typically, I look at where and why companies invest their money, and the reasons behind those decisions.
And through that research, did you become interested in understanding the role and determinants of women’s participation in innovation?
Yes, this is called the gender patent gap. We look at patents as the outcome of innovation and quickly realized that there are big differences in innovation participation between men and women around the world. The geographical distribution seen in the global map of women's innovation was shocking to my American co-author.
In former communist countries, compared to NATO member states, the number of women patented was twice as high as that of men.
So I investigated why men and women have roughly equal innovation participation rates in some ex-communist countries in Eastern Europe, while in NATO countries like Australia, at the same point in time, women are at 10% and men are at 90%.
This is an interesting fact, but the more important question is why there are such big differences between countries. Surely women shouldn't be that different in East and West Germany, or Austria and Slovakia, etc. This led me to look into the influence of role models, external interventions like contraception, discriminatory laws, and societal stereotypes.
