Laurel Smith-Doerr
Biographic Data
| ID | 192766 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Laurel Smith-Doerr |
| GIVEN NAMES | Laurel |
| FAMILY NAME | Smith-Doerr |
| SIGNATURE | SMITH-DOERR L |
| AFFILIATIONS | Boston University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5162-0491 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 129 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
The Maya Effect
Unequal credit in academic collaboration has long been understood through the Matthew effect—more credit is given to already famous coauthors. The Matilda effect posits that women receive less credit than men, assumed to be riding collaborators’ coattails. Analyzing 62 interviews that center women faculty of color contrasted with three same-rank colleagues (white women, men of color, and white men), we theorize the Maya effect: how unequal credit…
Publishing in General Sociology Journals
I don't believe that I have been wanted
Many studies document that faculty of color, and particularly women of color, find the academy unwelcoming. Yet research that centers intersectional understanding of the mechanisms leading to these inequalities is underdeveloped. We identify three context-dependent mechanisms of racial and gender disadvantage among faculty: active exclusion, overinclusion, and passive exclusion. Taking an explicitly intersectional approach that builds on relation…
Deciding Together as Faculty
Workplace inequalities scholarship often assumes making people aware of problems will lead to change, although gendered and racialized organizations theories show systemic problems beyond individual awareness. Still, not enough research analyzes the narratives of savvy organizational actors – like university faculty aware of inequalities – to understand the mechanisms operating against leveraging that knowledge for change. Data consist of 10 grou…
Five Big Ideas About AI
Massive investments in artificial intelligence (AI) have sparked a renewed debate over its impact on how we live, learn, and work. The last few years have also seen a burst of critical sociology about AI, pushing the conversation toward a deeper understanding of structural and intersectional inequalities. Here, we offer five big ideas that highlight what is distinctive about the emerging sociology of AI
Creating inclusive department climates in STEM fields
Climate studies that measure equity and inclusion among faculty reveal widespread gender and race disparities in higher education. The chilly departmental climate that women and faculty of color experience is typically measured through university-wide surveys. Although inclusion plays out at the department level, research rarely focuses on departments. Drawing from 57 interviews with faculty in 14 science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) …
Gender and innovation through an intersectional lens
How to study inequality in innovation? Often, the focus has been gender gaps in patenting. Yet much is missing from our understanding of gendered inequality in innovation with this focus. This review discusses how gender and innovation are intertwined in durable academic inequalities and have implications for who is served by innovation. It summarizes research on gender and race gaps in academic entrepreneurship (including patenting), reasons for…
Toward a Sociology of Artificial Intelligence
This article outlines a research agenda for a sociology of artificial intelligence (AI). The authors review two areas in which sociological theories and methods have made significant contributions to the study of inequalities and AI: (1) the politics of algorithms, data, and code and (2) the social shaping of AI in practice. The authors contrast sociological approaches that emphasize intersectional inequalities and social structure with other dis…
Hidden Injustice and Anti-Science
This essay responds to the five articles on Anti-Science in this journal issue by discussing a significant theme identified across all of them: hidden injustice. Some of the ways that injustice is hidden by organizational forces related to anti-science are identified. In response, the essay points to the need for empirical data on anti-science policies, a symmetric approach to anti-science contexts, and institutional analysis of anti-science powe…
Surrogate Humanity
Gender Pay Gaps in U.S. Federal Science Agencies
This study advances understanding of gender pay gaps by examining organizational variation. The gender pay gap literature supplies mechanisms but does not attend to organizational variation; the gender and science literature provides insights on the role of masculinist culture in disciplines but misses pay gap mechanisms. A data set of federal workers allows comparison of men and women in the same jobs and workplaces. Agencies associated with tra…
How Diversity Matters in the US Science and Engineering Workforce
How the race and gender diversity of team members is related to innovative science and technology outcomes is debated in the scholarly literature. Some studies find diversity is linked to creativity and productivity, other studies find that diversity has no effect or even negative effects on team outcomes. Based on a critical review of the literature, this paper explains the seemingly contradictory findings through careful attention to the organi…
Collaboration and Gender Equity among Academic Scientists
Universities were established as hierarchical bureaucracies that reward individual attainment in evaluating success. Yet collaboration is crucial both to 21st century science and, we argue, to advancing equity for women academic scientists. We draw from research on gender equity and on collaboration in higher education, and report on data collected on one campus. Sixteen focus group meetings were held with 85 faculty members from STEM departments…
Trouble in the University
Mind the Gap
Asymmetrical convergence is the increasing overlap between academic and industrial sectors, but with academia moving closer toward for-profit industrial norms than vice versa. Although this concept, developed by Kleinman and Vallas, is useful, processes of asymmetrical convergence in daily laboratory life are largely unexplored. Here, observations of three lab groups of chemical scientists in academic and industry contexts illustrate variation in…
Flexible Organizations, Innovation and Gender Equality
Why did women writers do so well in the early American film industry? Content analysis of articles published in Moving Picture World and the New York Times, 1907–27, shows early film studios were flexible in job assignments and collaborated with other studios. This non-bureaucratic configuration was more conducive to female screenwriters than the hierarchical studio system that emerged later in the 1920s. Women writers had more visibility and aut…
Expanding Entrepreneurship
Research on immigrant entrepreneurs in the United States has focused on small businesses in the retail and food service sectors rather than on high-technology start ups. Scholarship on women and immigrants in the U.S. science and technology workforce has focused on academia rather than scientists in industry. This article aims to bridge the gaps in these two literatures by examining the role of women and immigrants in founding science-based biote…
Discourses of Dislike
RECENTLY ESTABLISHED POLICIES FOR ethical conduct of researchers have resulted in efforts to implement those policies through educational practices. While these policies and training efforts have good intentions, how do researchers respond? Little research has been conducted to understand how researchers react to ethics policies, and to ethics education requirements as a particularly salient part of the policies. This research explores variations…
Decoupling Policy and Practice
Women Inventors in Context
Explanations of productivity differences between men and women in science tend to focus on the academic sector and the individual level. This article examines how variation in organizational logic affects sex differences in scientists' commercial productivity, as measured by patenting. Using detailed data from a sample of academic and industrial life scientists working in the United States, the authors present multivariate regression models of sc…
Product Review
Stuck in the Middle
Why do some Ph.D.'s languish in positions with little authority, and what does educational background have to do with it? Hypotheses predicted that life scientists with Ph.D.'s from elite programs would be the most likely, those from middle-ranked programs the next most likely, and those from lower ranked programs the least likely to achieve supervisory positions. A sample of 2,062 life scientists with doctorates from U.S. universities was collec…
Institutionalizing the Network Form
Product Review
Flexibility and Fairness
Why do women have more opportunities in some employment settings? I investigate how organizational form affects gender stratification among life scientists. I propose that firms governed by networks, rather than bureaucracies, allow for greater equity. Hierarchy and rules hide gender bias, while reliance on ties outside the organization provides transparency and flexibility. I analyze the careers of 2,062 U.S. life scientists and interviews with …
Toward a Sociology of Artificial Intelligence
This article outlines a research agenda for a sociology of artificial intelligence (AI). The authors review two areas in which sociological theories and methods have made significant contributions to the study of inequalities and AI: (1) the politics of algorithms, data, and code and (2) the social shaping of AI in practice. The authors contrast sociological approaches that emphasize intersectional inequalities and social structure with other dis…
Flexibility and Fairness
Why do women have more opportunities in some employment settings? I investigate how organizational form affects gender stratification among life scientists. I propose that firms governed by networks, rather than bureaucracies, allow for greater equity. Hierarchy and rules hide gender bias, while reliance on ties outside the organization provides transparency and flexibility. I analyze the careers of 2,062 U.S. life scientists and interviews with …
Collaboration and Gender Equity among Academic Scientists
Universities were established as hierarchical bureaucracies that reward individual attainment in evaluating success. Yet collaboration is crucial both to 21st century science and, we argue, to advancing equity for women academic scientists. We draw from research on gender equity and on collaboration in higher education, and report on data collected on one campus. Sixteen focus group meetings were held with 85 faculty members from STEM departments…
Gender Pay Gaps in U.S. Federal Science Agencies
This study advances understanding of gender pay gaps by examining organizational variation. The gender pay gap literature supplies mechanisms but does not attend to organizational variation; the gender and science literature provides insights on the role of masculinist culture in disciplines but misses pay gap mechanisms. A data set of federal workers allows comparison of men and women in the same jobs and workplaces. Agencies associated with tra…
Women Inventors in Context
Explanations of productivity differences between men and women in science tend to focus on the academic sector and the individual level. This article examines how variation in organizational logic affects sex differences in scientists' commercial productivity, as measured by patenting. Using detailed data from a sample of academic and industrial life scientists working in the United States, the authors present multivariate regression models of sc…
Institutionalizing the Network Form
Mind the Gap
Asymmetrical convergence is the increasing overlap between academic and industrial sectors, but with academia moving closer toward for-profit industrial norms than vice versa. Although this concept, developed by Kleinman and Vallas, is useful, processes of asymmetrical convergence in daily laboratory life are largely unexplored. Here, observations of three lab groups of chemical scientists in academic and industry contexts illustrate variation in…
Deciding Together as Faculty
Workplace inequalities scholarship often assumes making people aware of problems will lead to change, although gendered and racialized organizations theories show systemic problems beyond individual awareness. Still, not enough research analyzes the narratives of savvy organizational actors – like university faculty aware of inequalities – to understand the mechanisms operating against leveraging that knowledge for change. Data consist of 10 grou…
I don't believe that I have been wanted
Many studies document that faculty of color, and particularly women of color, find the academy unwelcoming. Yet research that centers intersectional understanding of the mechanisms leading to these inequalities is underdeveloped. We identify three context-dependent mechanisms of racial and gender disadvantage among faculty: active exclusion, overinclusion, and passive exclusion. Taking an explicitly intersectional approach that builds on relation…
Creating inclusive department climates in STEM fields
Climate studies that measure equity and inclusion among faculty reveal widespread gender and race disparities in higher education. The chilly departmental climate that women and faculty of color experience is typically measured through university-wide surveys. Although inclusion plays out at the department level, research rarely focuses on departments. Drawing from 57 interviews with faculty in 14 science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) …
Decoupling Policy and Practice
Gender and innovation through an intersectional lens
How to study inequality in innovation? Often, the focus has been gender gaps in patenting. Yet much is missing from our understanding of gendered inequality in innovation with this focus. This review discusses how gender and innovation are intertwined in durable academic inequalities and have implications for who is served by innovation. It summarizes research on gender and race gaps in academic entrepreneurship (including patenting), reasons for…
Discourses of Dislike
RECENTLY ESTABLISHED POLICIES FOR ethical conduct of researchers have resulted in efforts to implement those policies through educational practices. While these policies and training efforts have good intentions, how do researchers respond? Little research has been conducted to understand how researchers react to ethics policies, and to ethics education requirements as a particularly salient part of the policies. This research explores variations…
Rayman, Paula M., Beyond the Bottom Line; The Search for Dignity at Work
RAYMAN, Paula M., BEYOND THE BOTTOM LINE; The Search for Dignity at Work. New York, NY: Palgrave (St. Martin's Press), 2001, 220pp., $ 26.95 hardcover. Can you work and have a life? Paula Rayman addresses this question in her book, which looks not only at the search for dignity at work but also at home and in the community. In the literature on work/family, the answer that seems to be emerging from the cumulative evidence is a negative one, espec…
Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Vol. 19
Product Review
Flexibility and Fairness
Why do women have more opportunities in some employment settings? I investigate how organizational form affects gender stratification among life scientists. I propose that firms governed by networks, rather than bureaucracies, allow for greater equity. Hierarchy and rules hide gender bias, while reliance on ties outside the organization provides transparency and flexibility. I analyze the careers of 2,062 U.S. life scientists and interviews with …
Institutionalizing the Network Form
Stuck in the Middle
Why do some Ph.D.'s languish in positions with little authority, and what does educational background have to do with it? Hypotheses predicted that life scientists with Ph.D.'s from elite programs would be the most likely, those from middle-ranked programs the next most likely, and those from lower ranked programs the least likely to achieve supervisory positions. A sample of 2,062 life scientists with doctorates from U.S. universities was collec…
Product Review
Decoupling Policy and Practice
Women Inventors in Context
Explanations of productivity differences between men and women in science tend to focus on the academic sector and the individual level. This article examines how variation in organizational logic affects sex differences in scientists' commercial productivity, as measured by patenting. Using detailed data from a sample of academic and industrial life scientists working in the United States, the authors present multivariate regression models of sc…
Discourses of Dislike
RECENTLY ESTABLISHED POLICIES FOR ethical conduct of researchers have resulted in efforts to implement those policies through educational practices. While these policies and training efforts have good intentions, how do researchers respond? Little research has been conducted to understand how researchers react to ethics policies, and to ethics education requirements as a particularly salient part of the policies. This research explores variations…
Flexible Organizations, Innovation and Gender Equality
Why did women writers do so well in the early American film industry? Content analysis of articles published in Moving Picture World and the New York Times, 1907–27, shows early film studios were flexible in job assignments and collaborated with other studios. This non-bureaucratic configuration was more conducive to female screenwriters than the hierarchical studio system that emerged later in the 1920s. Women writers had more visibility and aut…
Expanding Entrepreneurship
Research on immigrant entrepreneurs in the United States has focused on small businesses in the retail and food service sectors rather than on high-technology start ups. Scholarship on women and immigrants in the U.S. science and technology workforce has focused on academia rather than scientists in industry. This article aims to bridge the gaps in these two literatures by examining the role of women and immigrants in founding science-based biote…
Mind the Gap
Asymmetrical convergence is the increasing overlap between academic and industrial sectors, but with academia moving closer toward for-profit industrial norms than vice versa. Although this concept, developed by Kleinman and Vallas, is useful, processes of asymmetrical convergence in daily laboratory life are largely unexplored. Here, observations of three lab groups of chemical scientists in academic and industry contexts illustrate variation in…
Trouble in the University
How Diversity Matters in the US Science and Engineering Workforce
How the race and gender diversity of team members is related to innovative science and technology outcomes is debated in the scholarly literature. Some studies find diversity is linked to creativity and productivity, other studies find that diversity has no effect or even negative effects on team outcomes. Based on a critical review of the literature, this paper explains the seemingly contradictory findings through careful attention to the organi…
Collaboration and Gender Equity among Academic Scientists
Universities were established as hierarchical bureaucracies that reward individual attainment in evaluating success. Yet collaboration is crucial both to 21st century science and, we argue, to advancing equity for women academic scientists. We draw from research on gender equity and on collaboration in higher education, and report on data collected on one campus. Sixteen focus group meetings were held with 85 faculty members from STEM departments…
Gender Pay Gaps in U.S. Federal Science Agencies
This study advances understanding of gender pay gaps by examining organizational variation. The gender pay gap literature supplies mechanisms but does not attend to organizational variation; the gender and science literature provides insights on the role of masculinist culture in disciplines but misses pay gap mechanisms. A data set of federal workers allows comparison of men and women in the same jobs and workplaces. Agencies associated with tra…
Hidden Injustice and Anti-Science
This essay responds to the five articles on Anti-Science in this journal issue by discussing a significant theme identified across all of them: hidden injustice. Some of the ways that injustice is hidden by organizational forces related to anti-science are identified. In response, the essay points to the need for empirical data on anti-science policies, a symmetric approach to anti-science contexts, and institutional analysis of anti-science powe…
Surrogate Humanity
Toward a Sociology of Artificial Intelligence
This article outlines a research agenda for a sociology of artificial intelligence (AI). The authors review two areas in which sociological theories and methods have made significant contributions to the study of inequalities and AI: (1) the politics of algorithms, data, and code and (2) the social shaping of AI in practice. The authors contrast sociological approaches that emphasize intersectional inequalities and social structure with other dis…
Five Big Ideas About AI
Massive investments in artificial intelligence (AI) have sparked a renewed debate over its impact on how we live, learn, and work. The last few years have also seen a burst of critical sociology about AI, pushing the conversation toward a deeper understanding of structural and intersectional inequalities. Here, we offer five big ideas that highlight what is distinctive about the emerging sociology of AI
Creating inclusive department climates in STEM fields
Climate studies that measure equity and inclusion among faculty reveal widespread gender and race disparities in higher education. The chilly departmental climate that women and faculty of color experience is typically measured through university-wide surveys. Although inclusion plays out at the department level, research rarely focuses on departments. Drawing from 57 interviews with faculty in 14 science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) …
Gender and innovation through an intersectional lens
How to study inequality in innovation? Often, the focus has been gender gaps in patenting. Yet much is missing from our understanding of gendered inequality in innovation with this focus. This review discusses how gender and innovation are intertwined in durable academic inequalities and have implications for who is served by innovation. It summarizes research on gender and race gaps in academic entrepreneurship (including patenting), reasons for…
Deciding Together as Faculty
Workplace inequalities scholarship often assumes making people aware of problems will lead to change, although gendered and racialized organizations theories show systemic problems beyond individual awareness. Still, not enough research analyzes the narratives of savvy organizational actors – like university faculty aware of inequalities – to understand the mechanisms operating against leveraging that knowledge for change. Data consist of 10 grou…
Publishing in General Sociology Journals
Sociology (26 works) · Political science (21 works) · Law (16 works) · Law (10 works) · Gender Diversity and Inequality (9 works) · Psychology (8 works) · Public relations (8 works) · Diversity and Career in Medicine (7 works) · Gender Studies (7 works) · Economics (6 works)