Marianne Cooper

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.

Dr. Cooper was the lead researcher for Sheryl Sandberg’s NYT best-seller Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead and she is an author on all of the Lean In & McKinsey Women in the Workplace reports.

Dr. Cooper is an expert on gender, women’s leadership, diversity and inclusion, the future of work, financial insecurity, and economic inequality. Her book, Cut Adrift: Families in Insecure Times, examines how families are coping in an insecure age. A LinkedIn influencer, she has written for The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Harvard Business Review, CNN, and Politico among others. Dr. Cooper is a frequent public speaker, most recently at TEDx, the NYT New Rules Summit, Fortune MPW Next Gen, Adobe, Sony, and more. Dr. Cooper is an advisory board member of the Time’s Up, Measure Up initiative and an affiliated educator for the Center for Institutional Courage. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley. 

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 employees can thrive.  She also leads the Lab’s new research project on creating inclusive hybrid workplaces.