Our Team

Prof. Daphna Joel

Principal Investigator

Prof. Joel received her Ph.D. in psychology from Tel-Aviv University at 1998, and joined the faculty of TAU, after receiving the Alon fellowship for young Israeli scientists. She is currently a member of the School of Psychological Sciences and the Sagol School of Neuroscience. She studied the involvement of basal ganglia-thalamocortical circuits in normal and abnormal behavior, using mainly animal models of psychopathology. More recently she has expanded her work to research questions related to brain, sex and gender, applying various analytical methods to analyze diverse datasets, from large collections of brain scans to information obtained with self-report questionnaires. In a series of papers, she has described and tested the ‘mosaic’ hypothesis – the claim that sex differences in the brain do not add-up consistently in individuals; rather, most brains are composed of both features that are more common in females and features more common in males. This is also true of gender characteristics. Other studies focus on the relations between different aspects of gender, including gender identity, gendered behavior, sexuality, and attitudes towards the sexed body. Prof. Joel has published over 90 papers in refereed scientific journals and is also the author of Gender Mosaic: Beyond the Myth of the Male and Female Brain (Little, Brown, NY).

Dr. Veronica (Nica) Kostenko

Research Fellow

Dr. Kostenko holds a PhD in Social Sciences. She began her career at the Laboratory for Comparative Social Research (LCSR) headed by Ronald Inglehart at the Higher School of Economics, St. Petersburg, where she worked on cross-cultural research in values and gender. At LCSR, she contributed to projects responsible for collecting and analyzing data for the World Values Survey (WVS) and the European Values Study (EVS) across the post-Soviet region, gaining extensive experience in large-scale, comparative survey research. She later served as Associate Professor at the HSE and, since 2019, has been tenured at the European University at St. Petersburg, where she also held the position of Dean of Sociology. At EUSPb, she co-created the PANDAN project-based master’s program in Data Science with Yandex, designed to teach students from the humanities and social sciences how to apply advanced statistics and modern computational methods, such as natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV), to real research problems. She is currently a Research Fellow the lab. Her focus is on organizing and overseeing data collection, ensuring data quality control, and contributing to the construction of the Gender Mosaic Dataset. Within the lab, she is also involved in projects on aggression (through adversarial collaboration), religiosity and same-sex attraction, and gender mosaicism, combining Bayesian along with frequentist statistics with cross-national comparative methods.

Dr. Sapir Keinan

Research Fellow

Dr. Keinan is a postdoctoral fellow at the lab. She holds a B.Sc. in Psychology and Biology from the Sagol School of Neuroscience, Tel Aviv University, an M.A. in Clinical Psychology from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and a Ph.D. in Psychology from Tel Aviv University. Her dissertation, under the supervision of Prof. Daphna Joel and Prof. Yoav Bar-Anan, examined the relationship between gender identity and sexual attraction using both direct and indirect measures. Alongside her academic work, Dr. Keinan is a licensed clinical psychologist and runs a private practice treating adults and adolescents. Her research focuses on within- and between-individual variability in gender identity and sexuality, and on the complex relations between the two. Using quantitative methods, she studies how self-reported experiences and implicit measures can provide complementary insights into human sexuality and gender. Her current projects explore cross-cultural perspectives, highlighting both similarities and differences in how people experience sexuality and gender.

Aviv Sion

Doctoral Student

Aviv studied psychology and humanities at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (B.A), Clinical Rehabilitative Psychology at Bar-Ilan University, and Art Therapy at the University of Haifa (M.A). His research examines diverse aspects of gender and sexuality from a developmental perspective. Aviv explores whether facets such as gender typicality, gender identity, and sexual orientation align within individuals, how these aspects relate to feelings about the body’s sex characteristics as they develop during puberty and whether these feelings change in adulthood. The research combines large-scale quantitative data with qualitative methods such as in-depth interviews.

Tatiana (Tanya) Rubinstein (she/her)

Doctoral Student

Tanya holds a B.Sc. in Psychology and Biology with an emphasis on Neuroscience and an M.A. in Interdisciplinary Psychology from Tel Aviv University, and is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in Psychology. Alongside her academic training, she has extensive experience in the social justice field, having worked and volunteered in feminist and queer organizing. She also serves as a teaching assistant in statistics and various marketing courses. Her doctoral research examines the influence of the gender mosaic framework on gender bias and attitudes. More broadly, she is interested in how gender shapes social cognition and social evaluation, with a particular focus on the intersections of gender, attitudes, and social impact. Methodologically, she has experience in experimental design, programming experiments, and conducting statistical analysis in R. Her work aims to advance understanding of how conceptualizations of gender can inform both academic theory and practical efforts toward equity.

Noga Paz

MA Student

Noga is an M.A. student in Psychology at Tel Aviv University, where she also completed her B.A. in Psychology and Gender Studies. Her research focuses on exploring gender biases in language through computational and cognitive perspectives. By applying Word Embedding models and Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, she aims to uncover linguistic patterns that reflect gendered cognition and communication styles. Through this work, she seeks to contribute to a deeper understanding of how gender-related linguistic nuances shape thought and social perception, and how advanced computational tools can help reveal these subtle dynamics.

Maya Arazi

BA Student

Maya is a philosophy and psychology BA student at Tel Aviv University. Her relationship with TAU began in her teens through the “Noar Shocher Mada” enrichment program for gifted youth, where she completed a research seminar in the social sciences and later authored a study on adolescents’ attitudes toward gender roles under the supervision of Prof. Gidi Rubinstein. For this work she received the Outstanding Researcher Award from the President of Tel Aviv University in 2014, on the occasion of International Women’s Day. Today she also serves as Head of AI and Product Operations at Semperis, a cybersecurity company in the identity-security space, and runs an independent consulting practice supporting organizations like the Myers-JDC-Brookdale institute for applied social research on AI integration and research practices. Maya holds the rank of Major following an extensive service in Unit 8200, where she led cyber operations and ML/AI projects. Alongside her technological career, she has been a sustained feminist activist. She is the founder and leader of a pro-bono cybersecurity protection initiative for women survivors of domestic and intimate-partner violence, and produced the Michal Sela Forum SAFE@HOME Hackathon (2021). At the Gender Mosaic Lab, Maya investigates gender biases in large language models. Her central project involves probing how representations of gender emerge, stabilize, and propagate within AI systems, and testing whether the mosaic framework can reshape how fairness is defined and measured in machine learning. Her technical toolkit includes Python, SQL, SPSS, statistical modeling, and simulation, alongside training in both qualitative and quantitative research methodologies.

Eyal Noy

Statistician

Eyal holds an M.Sc. in Statistics and Data Science from Tel Aviv University. He works as the lab’s statistician, providing statistical consultation and programming support for ongoing research projects. In his role, Eyal collaborates closely with lab members at all stages of the research process, from study design through data analysis to interpretation of results.