I am an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Before joining UIC, I received a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, and a BA from the University of Pennsylvania. My research examines the reproduction of inequality within the workplace and family. Currently, I am examining the causes and consequences of workplace inequality across various sectors of the economy – from the low-wage service sector to the high-wage tech industry.

My book project draws on longitudinal in-depth interviews with tech workers to understand how inequality is reproduced in the San Francisco Bay Area tech industry. In recent articles based on this research, I examine how tech workers define and discuss diversity and how gender affects career trajectories in the industry.

Another stream of my research examines the lives of low-wage retail and food service workers. I have studied how precarious scheduling practices affect childcare arrangements, parenting stress, work-life conflict, and other aspects of family life. I have also examined gender differences in how mothers and fathers working in the service industry deploy their status as parents at work.

 

I have conducted several studies related to families and finances as well. Here, I have examined social class differences in how adolescents learn about finances within the home, how families find and maintain housing in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the experiences of middle-income families during the Great Recession.

My research has been published in the American Journal of Sociology, Social Problems, Gender & Society, Journal of Family and Economic Issues, Social Service Review, Journal of Family Studies, RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, and City & Community.