RESEARCH
My projects span the areas of workplace inequalities, organizations, gender, and intersectionality. I study how gender shapes relationships, careers, and opportunities in the US innovation economy, including in private, for-profit tech companies and the academic sector.
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Networking to Nowhere: Relationships and Gender Inequality in Tech Work - coming spring 2026!
My current project is a book manuscript under contract with University of California Press, forthcoming in spring 2026. Through an ethnographic case study of one US tech company, I address one of the most enduring puzzles in the sociology of gender and work: how and why do well-paying, powerful industries remain stubbornly men-dominated and white, especially given deep investments in diversity, equity, and inclusion? Efforts to advance women in tech regularly focus on networking, evidenced by the abundance of women's groups and programs designed to overcome industry “old boys’ clubs.” This project identifies the subtle, everyday interactive processes perpetuating intersectional workplace inequalities. I also reveal the unintended consequences of corporate networking programs designed to improve organizational diversity and the status of women and people from underrepresented minority groups.
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Collaborating for Equity: Transforming STEM Faculty Careers
As a continuation of my postdoc with UMass Amherst's ADVANCE Program (PIs Laurel Smith-Doerr and Joya Misra), I collaborate on several projects investigating faculty's experiences of research collaboration, decision-making, and campus community by race, nationality, and gender. This research is based on faculty survey, qualitative interview, and focus group interview data. Together, our team produces research-backed solutions to shape policy and practices to support faculty equity and inclusion.
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Inequality in the New Economy
With Adia Harvey Wingfield (Washington University-St. Louis) and Steven Vallas (Northeastern University), I co-edited a volume of Research in the Sociology of Work titled "Race, Identity and Work" that explores the ways in which racial exclusion occurs in the new economy. This volume also considers the strategies that minority workers use to combat and change patterns of workplace inequality. Additionally, with sociologist Melissa Abad (Stanford University), I investigate the racial logic of diversity management programs in tech, examining emergent tensions as organizations responded to the Movement for Black Lives and calls for racial justice. This ethnographic project interrogates the whiteness of networking and community events, asking: How does race operate via the structure and culture of diversity programming? How do these organizational spaces reproduce or challenge the racial status quo of professional work?
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My research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, The College of Social & Behavioral Sciences at CSUSB, and the Office of the Provost at Northeastern University, and has received awards from the American Sociological Association, Sociologists for Women in Society, The Boston Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality, and Northeastern University’s Department of Sociology and Anthropology.
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