Projects

I conduct NSF-funded sociological research into how culture shapes our understandings and opportunities in ways that vary according to gender, social class, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, and other axes of identity and power.

Academic STEM provides an exemplar case for my research because it presents a fascinating paradox. Academic scientists venerate meritocracy and believe that research universities provide a space for basic research and objective judgement, uncontaminated by profit and politics. Yet meritocracy in STEM is in some ways a myth. Many scientists from underrepresented groups — including Black and Latinx men and women, white women, and LGBTQ persons are underrepresented and often feel devalued. Much research on this topic focuses on individual implicit bias, the cognitive shortcuts such as the automatic associations between men, masculinity, and STEM competence. This focus misses another source of inequity: the cultural foundations of STEM. In contrast to implicit bias, which is broadly seen as unfair, most STEM professors revere the core cultural content of STEM and believe it is applied fairly and universally. In this cultural content is a set of cultural schemas, historically rooted, broadly shared understandings of merit, which provide cognitive, moralized, and emotional sets of beliefs and commitments.

My book, Misconceiving Merit: Paradoxes of Excellence and Devotion, with Erin Cech, and related articles, uncovers and analyzes two core cultural schemas — the work devotion schema and the schema of scientific excellence — by which STEM faculty assess and often mismeasure merit.

Another NSF-funded project, with engineering faculty Pamela Cosman (Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering) and Stephanie Fraley (Department of Bioengineering) asks whether these patterns are changing.

Are early career academics being evaluated more fairly? Are diverse early career academics less invested in the schemas of work devotion and scientific excellence? Do they believe that commitments to inclusive excellence means watering down excellence? Here are some of the findings.

Our 2022 Science article “Can Rubrics Combat Gender Bias in Faculty Hiring?” (DOI 10.1126/science.abm2329), finds that using hiring rubrics to rate faculty candidates, considered a best practice, still smuggles in individual biases. Yet we explain how these biases can be mitigated by the department working together with sociologically astuteness. (See coverage in Inside Higher Ed).

Our analysis of faculty candidates’ original talks on their research finds that women candidates face more interruptions and often have less time to bring their talks to a compelling conclusion. We argue that this illustrates the “stricter standards” of competence often demanded by evaluators of women applying for a masculine-typed job. We conclude with policy recommendations.

Relatedly, with a team of medical faculty and legal scholars, I studied parental leave policies for students at highly-ranked U.S. medical schools and found that only 14% had substantive, stand-alone parental leave policies. Given the role of childbearing as a factor in gender disparities and potential impact on racial disparities for students of color, medical school leadership should implement best practice parental policies. Strengthening policies could increase equity in medical education and positively affect the patient population.

Beyond academic scientists, I have a series of research articles on STEM professionals in industry. 

In “The Changing Career Trajectories of New Parents in STEM,” Erin Cech and I analyze a nationally representative, 8-year longitudinal sample of STEM professionals. We find that new parenthood creates a transition out of full-time professional STEM work for 26% of new fathers and 43% of new mothers, highlighting the need for STEM industries to become more accommodating for parents. This piece was recognized as a top 10 article of 2019 to make a “large impact on the public understanding of science.”

This project is complemented by my analysis, with Erin Cech, of the cultural meanings of work in STEM industry. We show how the experience of overload and overwork among women STEM professionals is buffered by their personal embrace of the “work devotion schema” for women without children but not for mothers.

Erin Cech and I also analyze the different cultural ways in which women STEM professionals understand gendered barriers.

I have a longstanding research trajectory on understanding the cultural and structural factors shaping the gendered experiences among business leaders.  

Why do men continue to dominate positions at the pinnacle of corporate power, not only in laissez-faire U.S. but also in family-friendly, gender-egalitarian Norway? Dr. Sigtona Halrynjo (Institute for Social Research, Oslo) and I begin to tackle this question in research funded by the Norwegian Research Council and the Max Planck/Sciences Po institute.

My award-winning book Competing Devotions analyzes the moralized and compelling cultural understandings of professional work and of gender that create work-family conflict and gender inequality for many professionals. This book and several articles focus on the experiences of women executives.

Three other research papers analyze corporate power, devotion, and cultural constraints among men executives.