RESEARCH
My ongoing and future research projects center on sociological analyses of power and oppression in the innovation ecosystem, contributing to understandings of how and why to include women and BIPOC individuals in knowledge production.
Networking to Nowhere: Relationships and Gender Inequality in Tech Work
My current research is a qualitative case study of a U.S. high-tech organization. High-tech companies in the United States claim corporate cultures of inclusion, but the industry is dominated by young, white men. Efforts to advance women in knowledge-based industries regularly focus on networking, evidenced by the plethora of support programs designed to facilitate women building strategic relationships to overcome “old boys’ clubs.” This project identifies subtle interactive processes perpetuating intersectional inequalities within high-tech. I also reveal the unintended consequences of corporate networking programs designed to improve organizational diversity and the status of women and minorities.
Collaborating for Equity: Transforming STEM Faculty Careers
As a Postdoctoral Research Associate with UMass Amherst's ADVANCE Program (PI Laurel Smith-Doerr), I am working on various collaborative projects focused on understanding how faculty's race, gender, and nationality affect their experiences of research collaboration, decision-making, and campus community. This research is based on faculty survey, qualitative interview, and focus group interview data. The questions of this research builds on my independent meta-analysis conducted as a Virtual Visiting Scholar with NSF-funded ADVANCE Resource Coordination (ARC) Network. This meta-ethnography of research on STEM faculty networks identifies gender and racialized network patterns that in part contribute to differential career outcomes, including productivity, retention, and advancement, for women and faculty of color.
Inequality in the New Economy
With Adia Harvey Wingfield (Washington University-St. Louis) and Steven Vallas (Northeastern University), I have 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 tensions arising as organizations respond 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?
My research has been funded by the National Science Foundation 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.