A Postdoc at Stanford: researching gender inequality at work

By Rayna A. Sage

Dr. Lindsey Trimble-O'Connor Following in the footsteps of her mentor, Dr. Julie Kmec, alumna Dr. Lindsey Trimble-O’Connor (’12, PhD) took a moment to check in with us from her post as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at The Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University. At the institute, Lindsey splits her time between two main projects. She spends some of her time writing for the Institute’s online publication, Gender News, which prides itself on being accessible for general audiences, bridging the divide between academia and the public. Her second responsibility has been working with an interdisciplinary research team on issues related to the “stalled gender revolution” and how we, as a culture, define work and the ideal worker (e.g., the unencumbered worker who can arrive early and stay late for meetings), and how this definition may be holding women back at work.

Lindsey’s own developing research agenda considers other facets of gender inequality related to the workplace. In one project, she is using a national data set to examine the organizational and job-level factors that affect workers’ use of family-friendly leave policies. In another project, she is collaborating with colleagues at UC-Berkeley to look at the barriers to leave policy use among low-income women and men.