Harriet Holter

Harriet Holter (11 April 1922 – 18 December 1997) was a Norwegian social psychologist.

Career She graduated with the cand.oecon. degree in 1946, and was eventually hired as a research fellow at the Norwegian Institute for Social Research, which was established in 1950.

Despite having a degree in economics, the prospect of making an academic career in this field became unsettling for Holter. In her early career, she researched the working life. After analyses of the role of women in the workforce, she began concentrating more on women's studies in general. As she took the dr.philos. degree in 1970 on the thesis Sex Roles and Social Structure (which was also selected for the Norwegian Sociology Canon in 2009–2011), Holter became a pioneer in this field in the Nordic countries.

In 2008 her son Øystein Gullvåg Holter became Norway's first professor of men's studies, having been appointed at the University of Oslo.