The Department of Sociology Fall 2023 Colloquium Series Presents: Dr. Joel Mittleman

The Department of Sociology Fall 2023 Colloquium Series Presents: Dr. Joel Mittleman

On Monday, October 23, 2023, the Sociology Colloquium Series will feature Dr. Joel Mittleman. Joel Mittleman is the William P. and Hazel B. White Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame, where he is affiliated with the Gender Studies Program and the Center for Research on Educational Opportunity. Mittleman’s research analyzes inequality in schools and society with a focus on sexuality and LGBTQ+ populations. His research has been published in the American Sociological Review, Demography, and Gender & Society, among other venues, and has received outstanding article awards from the Inequality, Poverty and Mobility, Sociology of Population and Sociology of Education sections of the ASA. Currently, Mittleman is a National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow, working on a new, nonbinary history of educational stratification in America.

Colloquia Title and Topic:

"Gender Inequality Beyond the Gender Binary"

For the first time ever, LGBTQ+ populations are being invited to “come out” across a wide range of large, population-representative datasets. This new visibility not only provides sociologists with an historic opportunity to study queer people; it also invites us to study all people in more queer ways. In this talk, I present a new method to support this effort: what I call a “gender predictive” approach. Applying the tools of supervised machine learning, a “gender predictive” approach identifies new spectrums of gendered experience using old sources of survey data. To motivate this approach, I examine one pressing site of gender inequality in America today: the rapidly growing gender gap in higher education. Analyzing seven nationally representative high school cohort studies, spanning six decades, I present a new picture of how sex, gender and sexuality intersectionally shape school success.