Margaret M. Chin

Margaret M. Chin was born and raised in New York City and is herself a child of Chinese immigrant parents. She is Professor of Sociology at Hunter College and The Graduate Center. Margaret received her B.A. from Harvard University and her Ph.D. from Columbia University. Her publications include the award winning books - Stuck: Why Asian Americans Don't Reach the Top of the Corporate Ladder, a perceptive interview analysis of how factors such as race and trust can hold second-generation Asian Americans back and Sewing Women: Immigrants and the NYC Garment Industry, an illuminating comparative ethnography on the Chinese, Korean, Mexican and Ecuadorian garment workers. She is a faculty associate of the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute, the Asian American Studies Center, and the Hunter HCAP. Margaret is a board member of the Tenement Museum in NYC and a co-founder and board member of the Coalition for a Diverse Harvard.

Margaret's honors include an American Sociological Association's Minority Fellows Award, an NSF Dissertation Grant, a Social Science Research Councils Postdoctoral Fellowship in International Migration, and a Woodrow Wilson Foundation / Institute for Citizens & Scholars Career Enhancement Fellowship. She was the vice president of the Eastern Sociological Society (2015-2016). Her specialties include immigration, race, Asian Americans, family, work, education, and children of immigrants.

Stuck: Why Asian Americans Don’t Reach the Top of the Corporate Ladder was awarded the 2022 Max Weber Award for Distinguished Scholarship, given by the American Sociological Association’s Section on Organizations, Occupations and Work and the 2021 PROSE (Professional and Scholarly Excellence) Book Award in the Business, Finance and Management Category given by the Association of American Publishers.

Her book Sewing Women: Immigrants and the NYC Garment Industry was honored by the Coalition for Labor Union Women (CLUW) and received an honorable mention from the Thomas and Znaniecki Book Award committee of the International Migration Section of the ASA. She's currently working on a third book with Syed Ali (professor of Sociology at Long Island University), tentatively titled The Peer Effect: Building Better Schools and Better Workplaces.

https://www.hunter.cuny.edu/sociology/faculty/margaret-m.-chin