Research
A central puzzle underlies my research: why are some forms of inequality so resilient, despite the rise of legal and cultural mandates for equality in the United States over the last half-century? I address this puzzle by investigating cultural mechanisms of inequality reproduction, particularly cultural beliefs and practices (e.g. meritocracy, self-expression, scientific excellence) that seem objective or benign but may serve as powerful forces reproducing inequality. I seek out these cultural mechanisms in three interrelated substantive arenas described below.
I am currently working on two new books:
Workplace Equity Wars: Confronting the Moral Codes that Maintain Inequality (early 2027; Polity Press)
A culture war over workplace equity is raging. Initiatives to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion have always faced resistance, and recent backlash threatens to halt the fight against prejudice and discrimination. In Workplace Equity Wars, Erin A. Cech argues that this clash is bigger than disputes over specific programs; it goes beyond political polarization. It is a battle over the morality of work itself.
Drawing on rich survey and interview data, Cech introduces a novel framework of six moral “commandments” that anchor opposition to equity efforts. These widely shared moral codes shape how we define fair workplaces and how we judge our colleagues (and ourselves) as good workers and good people. Yet they are built on false—and deeply biased—foundations. When people believe equity efforts violate these commandments, their opposition can be immediate and fierce.
Moving beyond diagnosis, Workplace Equity Wars offers readers practical tools for contending with opposition. Through self-assessments, strategies for group and team dialogue, and recommendations for rethinking workplace programs and training, Cech provides a powerful new framework for understanding and confronting backlash against DEI initiatives. This timely and provocative book upends how leaders, employees, advocates, and scholars understand opposition and advance the future of workplace equality. (sign up here to be notified when it’s released)
Inequality Tales: The Stories People Tell about Social Differences and Why they Matter (early 2028; UCalifornia Press)
This book investigates the causal accounts that members of the public use to explain social differences. It paints the cultural landscape of these tales among the US public, reveals the rhetorical tricks that tale-tellers use to give victim-blaming accounts of inequality, highlights reframing moments that foster system-blaming perspectives, and shows the consequences of inequality tales for policy support and social action.
Inequality in STEM
STEM professions are useful sites for identifying cultural mechanisms of inequality reproduction because they are powerful social institutions that are popularly depicted as objective, bias-free, and insulated from the “messiness” of culture and politics; yet, ascriptive inequalities are particularly intractable within them. My past and current work in this area focuses on how gender, racial, and LGBTQ biases are interwoven into professional cultures of science and engineering, with consequences for who is seen as appropriate, competent, and excellent members of these fields.
I discussed this work in a recent Michigan Minds podcast.
Book, with Mary Blair-Loy: Misconceiving Merit: Paradoxes of Excellence and Devotion in Academic Science and Engineering, published in 2022.
Ongoing Research Efforts
LGBTQ Inequality
Professional cultures and gendered professional identities
Cultural Beliefs about “Good Work” and “Good Workers”
While formal anti-discrimination legislation has expanded over the last several decades and normative rejection of overt discrimination in the labor force has strengthened, work continues to anchor many of the most pernicious material and immaterial mechanisms of inequality in the US.
My research in this arena examines how cultural narratives about work—what “good work” and “a good worker” means—can buttress unequal workforce processes.
Ongoing Research Efforts
My most extensive undertaking in this arena, and a centerpiece of my current research efforts, is my recent book on a ubiquitous cultural schema I call the “passion principle.” The passion principle is the belief that self-expressive, fulfilling work should be the central guiding principle for career decision-making for college-going and college-educated career aspirants, even over and above financial stability.
My first book, The Trouble with Passion: How Searching for Fulfillment at Work Fosters Inequality, was published November 2021 and is available at the booksellers listed HERE.
You can hear about the passion principle in several recent podcasts and interviews.
In addition to this, I have investigated “flexibility stigma,” the negative assessment of workers who seek or are presumed to need schedule adjustments to care for personal responsibilities, as a site of inequality reproduction not only for workers with childcare responsibilities and flexible work arrangements, but for all workers—even those who seem to fulfill the “ideal worker norm.”
Popular Beliefs about Inequality
Sociologists have long worked to develop disciplinary understanding of ascriptive disadvantages, but much less is known about the landscape of cultural schemas that the general public uses to understand inequalities, or the ways such schemas may retrench (or challenge) those disadvantages. I argue that cultural schemas of inequality that explain social differences as rooted in biology, choice, or individual failings (rather than in structural processes), are powerful cultural scaffolds that help support many other processes of social inequality. Such schemas, for example, may help determine whether individuals tolerate or perpetuate prejudiced behaviors and support or oppose policy initiatives meant to undermine socio-demographic inequality.
Ongoing Research Efforts
Cultural schemas of inequality and reproduction of social disadvantage
Recognition of glass ceilings and chilly workplace climates