Institute leaders present research findings to ASA annual conference in Chicago
At the recent annual conference of the American Sociological Association, Clayman Institute Research Director Bethany Nichols and Executive Director Alison Dahl Crossley shared findings from Institute research projects on workplace nondisclosure agreements, digital anti-feminism, and threats to the persistence of online feminist communities.
In the session “Sexual Violence as a Structural Problem,” Nichols presented results from the Institute’s paper, “Silence and Stalled: How Non-Disclosure Agreements Shape the Careers of Sexual Harassment Survivors.” Nichols and her co-authors find that NDAs create lasting financial and emotional harm, limit career advancement, and protect toxic workplace cultures. Session participants expressed their excitement about the Institute’s interview data, their anticipation for the manuscript to be published, and inquired about how the team accessed such sensitive data. The paper was co-authored with Graduate Research Assistant Ariel Lam Chan, Director Adrian Daub, and Crossley.
“This ASA session was one of the most fruitful experiences I’ve ever had at the conference,” Nichols said. “I exchanged theoretical and methodological ideas with other panelists, and we plan to stay in touch to support each other’s projects. Most importantly, it’s significant that ASA centered sexual violence in its very own session this year; it tells the world that sexual violence is a topic that is not only of social importance but also worthy of meaningful study.”
Nichols and Crossley co-presented a second research project, co-authored with Daub, titled “Learning Digital Anti-Feminism: Depp v. Heard, YouTube and How Platforms Shape What counts as ‘Evidence.’” On this panel, Nichols and Crossley presented results that showed the life of the Depp v. Heard trial on YouTube and the ways antifeminism manifested across the platform. In the Q&A, session participants asked Nichols and Crossley about why such severe backlash existed against Amber Heard, and Nichols and Crossley were able to share with the audience about broader societal beliefs that often discredit and devalue the experiences of survivors of gender-based violence.
Crossley presented her paper, “Online Abeyance Structures and the Persistence of U.S. Feminism,” at a special session on “Enduring Social Movements” at ASA. In the presentation, she used the framework of social movement abeyance to extend arguments about the significance of social movement communities. Because feminist community is such a central feature of feminism, online feminist communities, largely on social media, are critical to the feminist movement today. In the last few years, however, media landscapes and social media corporations themselves have dramatically changed. Drawing on feminist social movement and feminist media scholarship, Crossley argued that online social movement community is dynamic and vulnerable in a way that offline social movement community is not. This suggests avenues for future research about the relationships between social media and abeyance and the dynamics of movement longevity overall.
Also at the conference, former Clayman Institute Director Shelley J. Correll began her term as president of the ASA. Correll is faculty director and principal investigator of the Stanford VMWare Women's Leadership Innovation Lab. She is the Michelle Mercer and Bruce Golden Family Professor of Women's Leadership and a professor of sociology.
