About

Kim Weeden is the Jan Rock Zubrow ’77 Professor of the Social Sciences and the Director of the Center for the Study of Inequality at Cornell University. Her academic background includes a Ph.D. from Stanford University obtained in 1999. Her research focuses on inequality in advanced industrial societies and how it evolves over time. She studies social mobility and persistence across generations, cohort and life cycle changes in occupational sex segregation, the social structure of college course enrollments, and the relationship between family wage gaps and gender wage gaps. Additionally, she investigates young adults' occupational plans and educational decisions. Kim Weeden is actively involved in open science and open access publishing. She is a co-founder and former Deputy Editor of Sociological Science and serves on the Board of the Society for Sociological Science. She also chairs the Scientific Advisory Board of the General Social Survey, which provides high-quality data about American life for social scientists, journalists, policymakers, and government officials.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Psychology
• Medicine
• Social Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Computer Science
• Public relations
• Social psychology
• Psychiatry
• Engineering
• World Wide Web
• Economics
• Mathematics education
• Pedagogy
• Law
• Virology
• Mechanical engineering
• Chemistry
• Economic growth
• Clinical psychology
• Demographic economics

Selected publications

• Replication Package: Is the gender wage gap really a family wage gap in disguise?

  OSF Preprints (OSF Preprints) · 2026-01-10

  otherSenior author

  Uses SIPP 2018 data to estimate what share of the gender wage gap in the US is associated with wage differences between parents and childless adults and between workers of different marital status

  Publisher

• A synthesis of evidence for policy from behavioural science during COVID-19

  Nature · 2023 · 107 citations

  • Political Science
  • Psychology
  • Public relations

  proposed 19 policy recommendations ('claims') detailing how evidence from behavioural science could contribute to efforts to reduce impacts and end the COVID-19 pandemic. Here we assess 747 pandemic-related research articles that empirically investigated those claims. We report the scale of evidence and whether evidence supports them to indicate applicability for policymaking. Two independent teams, involving 72 reviewers, found evidence for 18 of 19 claims, with both teams finding evidence supporting 16 (89%) of those 18 claims. The strongest evidence supported claims that anticipated culture, polarization and misinformation would be associated with policy effectiveness. Claims suggesting trusted leaders and positive social norms increased adherence to behavioural interventions also had strong empirical support, as did appealing to social consensus or bipartisan agreement. Targeted language in messaging yielded mixed effects and there were no effects for highlighting individual benefits or protecting others. No available evidence existed to assess any distinct differences in effects between using the terms 'physical distancing' and 'social distancing'. Analysis of 463 papers containing data showed generally large samples; 418 involved human participants with a mean of 16,848 (median of 1,699). That statistical power underscored improved suitability of behavioural science research for informing policy decisions. Furthermore, by implementing a standardized approach to evidence selection and synthesis, we amplify broader implications for advancing scientific evidence in policy formulation and prioritization.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Is the Gender Wage Gap Really a Family Wage Gap in Disguise?

  American Sociological Review · 2023-11-23 · 12 citations

  article

  Despite large literatures on gender and family wage gaps (e.g., the motherhood wage penalty, fatherhood wage premium, and the marriage premium) and widespread recognition that the two gaps are intertwined, the extent and pattern of their relationships are underexplored. Using data from the 2018 Survey of Income and Program Participation, we show that family wage gaps are strongly associated with the gender wage gap, as long assumed in the literature, but with important caveats. The gender-differentiated wage returns to parenthood contribute 29 percent of the gender wage gap. One third of this is associated with occupation, but very little with other worker and job attributes. The gender-differentiated returns to marriage contribute another 33 percent, two thirds of which is associated with worker and job attributes but very little with occupation. However, 36 percent of the gender wage gap is unrelated to these family wage gaps, and the gender wage gap among childless workers remains substantial. Moreover, for Black and Hispanic workers, the pattern of association is more complex and generally weaker than for White workers. These results caution against focusing solely on the wage gap between “mothers and others” and suggest new directions for research.

  PublisherDOI

• Review of “You’re Paid What You’re Worth And Other Myths of the Modern Economy”

  Social Forces · 2023-02-18

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Journal Article Review of “You’re Paid What You’re Worth And Other Myths of the Modern Economy” Get access By Jake Rosenfeld Harvard University Press, 2021. 384 pages. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674916593 Kim Weeden Kim Weeden Cornell University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Social Forces, Volume 102, Issue 1, September 2023, Page e4, https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soad017 Published: 20 February 2023 Article history Received: 17 January 2023 Accepted: 19 January 2023 Published: 20 February 2023

  PublisherDOI

• How Gender Segregation in Higher Education Contributes to Gender Segregation in the U.S. Labor Market

  Demography · 2023-04-10 · 21 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  What is the relationship between gender segregation in higher education and gender segregation in the labor market? Using Fossett's (2017) difference-of-means method for calculating segregation indices and data from the American Community Survey, we show that approximately 36% of occupational segregation among college-educated workers is associated with gender segregation across 173 fields of study, and roughly 64% reflects gender segregation within fields. A decomposition analysis shows that fields contribute to occupational segregation mainly through endowment effects (men's and women's uneven distribution across fields) than through the coefficient effects (gender differences in the likelihood of entering a male-dominated occupation from the same field). Endowment effects are highest in fields strongly linked to the labor market, suggesting that educational segregation among fields in which graduates tend to enter a limited set of occupations is particularly consequential for occupational segregation. Within-field occupational segregation is higher among heavily male-dominated fields than other fields, but it does not vary systematically by fields' STEM status or field-occupation linkage strength. Assuming the relationship between field segregation and occupational segregation is at least partly causal, these results imply that integrating higher education (e.g., by increasing women's representation in STEM majors) will reduce but not eliminate gender segregation in labor markets.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Who Rises Higher in First Job Attainment? Trends and Patterns of School-to-Work Transition in Hong Kong

  SAGE Publications, Inc. eBooks · 2023

  • Demographic economics
  • Psychology
  • Pedagogy
  PublisherDOI

• Crisis? What Crisis? Sociology’s Slow Progress Toward Scientific Transparency

  Harvard Data Science Review · 2023-10-27 · 8 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Column Editor's Note:The quest for transparency, the support of scientific inquiry, is key for credible research, regardless of the discipline.We started the Reinforcing Reproducibility and Replicability column in Issue 5.3 with a heavy focus on economics.In this column, Kim Weeden explores why sociology might be slow to adopt the standards and practices of scientific transparency.She sees one potential cause in the stronger fragmentation and laissez-faire approaches in sociology, in particular between qualitative and quantitative approaches.But she also sees in those same causes the possibility of a stronger bottom-up diffusion of such practices.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Using Social and Behavioural Science to Support COVID-19 Pandemic Response

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2022 · 85 citations

  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Social Science
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Evaluating expectations from social and behavioral science about COVID-19 and lessons for the next pandemic

  2022-10-10 · 22 citations

  preprintOpen access

  Social and behavioral science research proliferated during the COVID-19 pandemic, reflecting the substantial increase in influence of behavioral science in public health and public policy more broadly. This review presents a comprehensive assessment of 742 scientific articles on human behavior during COVID-19. Two independent teams evaluated 19 substantive policy recommendations (“claims”) on potentially critical aspects of behaviors during the pandemic drawn from the most widely cited behavioral science papers on COVID-19. Teams were made up of original authors and an independent team, all of whom were blinded to other team member reviews throughout. Both teams found evidence in support of 16 of the claims; for two claims, teams found only null evidence; and for no claims did the teams find evidence of effects in the opposite direction. One claim had no evidence available to assess. Seemingly due to the risks of the pandemic, most studies were limited to surveys, highlighting a need for more investment in field research and behavioral validation studies. The strongest findings indicate interventions that combat misinformation and polarization, and to utilize effective forms of messaging that engage trusted leaders and emphasize positive social norms.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Still a Small World? University Course Enrollment Networks before and during the COVID-19 Pandemic

  2021-01-03

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In normal times, the network ties that connect students on a college campus are an asset; during a pandemic, they can become a liability. Using pre-pandemic data from Cornell University, Weeden and Cornwell showed how co-enrollment in classes creates a “small world” network with high clustering, short path lengths, and multiple independent pathways connecting students. In this paper, we show how the structure of the enrollment network changed as Cornell, like many American colleges and universities, shifted to a hybrid instructional model with some courses online and others in person. Under this model, about half of students are disconnected from the in-person co-enrollment network. In this network, paths lengthened, the share of student pairs connected by three or fewer degrees of separation declined, and clustering increased, with a greater share of ties occurring between students in the same field. The small world became both less connected and more fragmented. (Corrected page proofs. Paper is forthcoming in Sociological Science.)

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• David B. Grusky

  Stanford University

  15 shared

• Stephen L. Morgan

  Johns Hopkins University

  7 shared

• Thijs Bol

  6 shared

• Katherine Baicker

  6 shared

• James N. Druckman

  University of Rochester

  5 shared

• Shinobu Kitayama

  5 shared

• Sander van der Linden

  University of Cambridge

  5 shared

• Naomi Ellemers

  5 shared