Marianne Cooper is a sociologist at the Stanford VMware Women’s Leadership Innovation Lab. She is also an affiliate at the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality.

Marianne was the lead researcher for Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead by Sheryl Sandberg. She is a contributor to LeanIn.org, a contributing writer to The Atlantic, and a LinkedIn influencer. She is an author of the 2016,  2017, and 2018 Lean In & McKinsey Women in the Workplace reports on the status of women in corporate America. She is an expert on gender, women’s leadership, diversity and inclusion, financial insecurity, and economic inequality.

At the Lab, she is a core team member of the Institute’s  Voice & Influence program, which empowers men and women to excel professionally and provides them with the knowledge and tools to create organizations where all employees thrive. At the Institute, she is also involved in conducting research and designing tools and solutions to increase the number of women leaders in education, industry, and government.  Her book, Cut Adrift: Families in Insecure Times, examines how families are coping in an insecure age. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley.