I am a sociologist and Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Yale School of Management. I work on topics at the intersection of organizations, gender, and cultural sociology with a focus on the future of work.
My recent research explores how the interaction between organizations and pay equity laws has shaped employers’ pay-setting practices. I use multiple methods including in-depth interviews, archival research, and survey experiments to provide insight into pay-setting as an organizational practice and site for the reproduction of inequality.
Other projects explore the world of work from the perspectives of workers, employers, and regulatory authorities. One paper explains why highly educated artists so often choose to earn a living from “bad” jobs. Another examines the role of cultural frames—and specifically the concept of regulatory capture—in shaping public debates over how to regulate the gig economy. In a paper coauthored with Elena Ayala-Hurtado, we explore how job-seekers navigate the tension between two powerful cultural scripts: on the one hand, a social capital script that impels us to use connections to access jobs and, on the other, a script about meritocracy that portrays the use of social ties as nepotism.
I have a PhD in sociology from Harvard University, a Masters in City Planning from UC Berkeley, and a Bachelors in the Humanities from Yale University.