Kristen Harknett is an associate professor of sociology at the University of California, San Francisco. Her research interests include economic influences on marriage, co-habitation, and childbearing; the causes and consequences of lacking material and emotional support from friends and family; and the influence of sex ratio imbalances and other aspects of social context on romantic relationships and childbearing. She received her Ph.D. in sociology and demography from Princeton University.
Expert Type: Grantee
Kristin Smith
Kristin Smith is a visiting research associate professor at Dartmouth College. Her research focus is on gender inequality, labor markets and employment, and work and family policy. She has researched labor force issues, including gender differences in job tenure and shifting determinants of women’s labor supply and the consequences of those shifts. In addition, Smith has studied occupational variation in earnings, job retention, and job flexibility, principally focused on care workers and more recently on Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics, or STEM, workers. Smith also studies family policy, including paid family and medical leave, examining inequity in access and impacts on labor supply decisions. Smith’s expertise lies in examining trends in how work and family life interconnect, developing workforce policy recommendations, and applying a gender lens to her analysis. She has a broad background in demography and sociology, has extensive experience in survey design and implementation, and is proficient at quantitative data analysis of cross-sectional and longitudinal data. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Maryland, an M.P.H. from Tulane University, and a B.A. from the University of Vermont.
Kevin Rinz
Kevin Rinz is a senior fellow and research advisor at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. Prior to joining Equitable Growth, Rinz held research roles as an economist at the U.S. Census Bureau and as a visiting scholar with the Opportunity and Inclusive Growth Institute at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. He also twice served in policy roles at the White House Council of Economic Advisers, first as a staff economist in 2013–2014 and then as a senior economist in 2021–2022. His research focuses on how policy can help people succeed in the labor market, and his work has appeared in journals including The Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Human Resources, Journal of Labor Economics, and Journal of Public Economics. Rinz received his B.A. in economics and mathematics from Northwestern University, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in economics from the University of Notre Dame.
Kathleen Ziol-Guest
Kathleen M. Ziol-Guest is research associate professor in the Department of Applied Statistics, Social Science, and Humanities at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. Ziol-Guest is also the project director for the Early Childhood Meta-Analysis Project (funded by the National Institutes of Health) in the Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools. She is a policy analyst whose research interests are centered on the demographic characteristics and socioeconomic environments of families as contexts for individual development. Her compilation of work cuts across the multiple domains of family structure and living arrangements; economic well-being, poverty, and mobility; and the health effects of nonhealth policies. She has received grants from the National Science Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation, and has published her work in Child Development, Social Science, & Medicine, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. She has been on the editorial board of the Journal of Marriage & Family since 2007. Ziol-Guest received a master of public affairs from the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University-Bloomington, her Ph.D. in public policy from the University of Chicago, and was a Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar at the Harvard School of Public Health.
Kate Bronfenbrenner
Kate Bronfenbrenner is the director of labor education research and a senior lecturer at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, where she does teaching and research on union and employer strategies in organizing and bargaining in the global economy; labor, race, and gender; and labor policy. Bronfenbrenner is also the co-director of the Worker Empowerment Research Network, a national network of scholars dedicated to producing more high-quality research on worker organizing and collective action. Prior to joining the Cornell faculty in 1993, she was an assistant professor in labor studies at Penn State University. Bronfenbrenner, who received her Ph.D. from Cornell in 1993, is the co-author and editor of several books on union and employer strategies, such as Organizing to Win: New Research Union Strategies, Global Unions: Challenging Transnational Capital through Cross Border Campaigns, and Ravenswood: The Steelworkers’ Victory and the Revival of American Labor.
J.W. Mason
J.W. Mason is an assistant professor of economics at John Jay College, City University of New York. Previously, he taught at Roosevelt University in Chicago. He is also a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. He has a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He was formerly the policy director for the New York State Working Families Party.
Joya Misra
Joya Misra is a professor of sociology and public policy at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her research and teaching primarily focus on social inequality, including inequalities by gender and gender identity, race, ethnicity, sexuality, nationality, citizenship, parenthood status, and educational level. Her work falls into the subfields of political sociology, economic sociology, public policy, work and labor, family, race/gender/class, comparative historical sociology, and welfare states. Her work has appeared in the American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Gender & Society, Social Forces, Social Problems, and numerous other professional journals and edited volumes. Misra edited Gender & Society from 2011-2015. She received her Ph.D. and M.A. in sociology from Emory University and her B.A. in religion from Centenary College.
Justine Hastings
Justine Hastings is VP and chief of people-centered science for Amazon People eXperience and Technology (formerly Human Resources) and an affiliate professor at the University of Washington. Prior, she was a professor of economics at Brown University. She has served as an expert economist for state and federal agencies in matters related to antitrust, energy, and environmental regulation. She holds a bachelor’s degree in economics and a master’s degree in agriculture and resource economics from the University of California, Davis; and she holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, Berkeley.
JooHee Han
JooHee Han is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Olso. His is research/teaching interests include social stratification and mobility, the labor market, work and occupation, crime and mass incarceration, and international migration, among other topics. He holds a B.A. and M.S. in sociology from Yonsei University and a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
John Voorheis
John Voorheis is a lead economist for survey and economic research in the U.S. Census Bureau’s Center for Economic Studies. Voorheis is an applied microeconomist, working on topics at the intersection of economic inequality, economic opportunity, and the environment. This work has focused on understanding the long term and intergenerational effects of the environment on households, improving measurement of the distribution of environmental hazards, and investigating the distribution of exposure to natural disasters and its effects of households and firms. His work at the Census Bureau has also focused on using administrative records from government and third-party sources to improve Census Bureau household surveys, and to create new experimental statistics on income inequality and income mobility. Voorheis is also an affiliate of the Environmental Inequality Lab at the University of Virginia and a member of the Conference on Research in Income and Wealth. Voorheis received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Oregon.