I am a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology and Demography at Princeton University. Broadly, my dissertation and pre-dissertation research examines the causes of gender, racial, ethnic, and immigrant/non-immigrant educational and labor market inequality. My dissertation addresses three puzzles: The growing, female-favoring gender gap in educational attainment in the United States; the evolution of the female-favoring gender gap in childhood behavioral/non-cognitive skills, and; the uneven penalties that males and females receive for early behavioral problems in terms of earnings in their early careers.

Specifically, my dissertation research poses three questions: First, do girls’ higher levels of non-cognitive skills help explain today’s female-favoring gender gap in educational attainment? Second, has this female advantage in behavioral/non-cognitive development grown across cohorts? And, third, do females receive the same returns to behavioral/non-cognitive skill as males in the labor market?

Prior to coming to Princeton, I received by B.A. from Swarthmore College in Sociology and Political Science and worked in the Education Policy Center of the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C.