About Me

I’m a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at Cornell University, USA. I study gender in the workplace, occupational mobility, legal professions, and social theory. The methods that I use are automated data collection and processing of public archives, in-depth interviews with legal professionals and politicians, agent-based social simulation models, and synthesis based on close comparison of central theoretical texts.

Research Agenda

My scholarly agenda integrates three complementary research strands. The first stream investigates how sudden societal shocks, like revolutions or economic depressions, affect occupational mobility in large organisations. The second line of research focuses on workplace gender segregation, with a special focus on legal professionals like judges, prosecutors, and lawyers. The third strand integrates two schools in the philosophy of science (Critical Realism and Nomological Pluralism) to provide a new epistemological framework for sociological research. My research has been presented at conferences in Europe, the USA and Canada, and has been featured in the popular media on DiscoverSociety.

Methods

In support of my substantive research agenda I have developed an automated pipeline that collects the digital employment rolls of judges and prosecutors, cleans the data, integrates them into an employment database going back to the 1980’s, and updates descriptive statistics. I have also applied, for the first time, agent-based models to the analysis of vacancy chains, in the process extending Python’s MESA package to cover movement in a hierarchical organisation. To ensure that all models are grounded in the experiences of those at the heart of the action, I have conducted dozens of interviews with elites in politics, law, and the media.