Katherine Weisshaar
Katherine Weisshaar is a sociologist whose research focuses on gender and economic stratification processes within families, workplaces, and society, with an interest in developing critical tests of causality by leveraging data and methods. She is particularly interested in how macro-level inequalities in the labor force are reproduced through micro- and meso-level processes in the workplace, in families, and in the work-family intersection. Her recent work examined labor market outcomes associated with intermittent labor force participation, with a specific examination of how periods of unemployment or “opting out” of work for family reasons affect labor market outcomes upon re-entry, such as hiring prospects, wages, and occupation. She has experience collecting her own data through field experiments, original surveys, and survey experiments, and has also worked with existing longitudinal survey data. Her research can be found in academic journals including American Sociological Review, Social Forces, and Demography.
Weisshaar received her BA in Sociology from Northwestern University in 2010 and her PhD in Sociology from Stanford in 2016.