Three doctoral students awarded Clayman Institute prizes

The Clayman Institute celebrates three Stanford doctoral students with academic prizes for 2023. These exceptional students have demonstrated notable contributions to gender scholarship through their research and writing.

Alex Chan was awarded the 2023 Marjorie Lozoff Prize for his research on women physicians. His working paper, “Discrimination Against Doctors: A Field Experiment,” is a creative investigation of the extent of gender and racial bias in patients’ selection of doctors. He measured the magnitude of patient bias using a well-accepted economics construct, willingness to pay. Chan recently completed his PhD in the Department of Health Policy and is currently an assistant professor at Harvard Business School. 

The Clayman Institute’s Marjorie Lozoff Prize honors the memory of Marjorie Morse Lozoff, a sociologist, social worker, teacher, researcher, wife, mother, and community leader. The Lozoff Prize is given annually to a graduate student conducting research on issues related to Lozoff’s interests, including reproductive rights and equal rights of women, with preference for research in the social sciences and the professions of medicine and law.

Seyi Osundeko won the 2023 Marilyn Yalom prize for her research on the representation of “feminine sorrow,” defined as a form of self-mourning produced by structural, societal, and/or cultural forces larger than the self.  As a PhD candidate in the Department of English, she draws on contemporary African American, African, and Black Diasporic literature, especially novels authored by women-identifying writers. Her project explores internal and external experiences of feminine sorrow in relation to psychosocial madness, collective cultures, and resistance. More specifically, Osundeko explores the operation of this self-mourning as a socially produced madness; the emotional regulation enacted in collective cultures that weaponize empathy; and the ways in which the women represented in these texts can be understood outside the binary of victim and heroine.

The Marilyn Yalom award is bestowed annually to a currently enrolled Stanford PhD candidate working in the humanities on issues concerning women and gender. The prize supports original research or conference costs. Yalom played a significant role in the Clayman Institute beginning in 1978 and served as both associate director and acting director. Prior to her death in 2019, she was a senior scholar and internationally acclaimed historian of women’s and gender issues as well as a prolific author.

Bethany Nichols was named the 2023 Myra Strober Prize winner for her writing during her 2022-23 term as a graduate dissertation fellow at the Clayman Institute. Her article "Following passion in work can lead to exploitation, inequality" covered a talk given by Erin Cech on her most recent book, The Trouble With Passion. Cech is associate professor of sociology at the University of Michigan and a former Clayman Institute postdoctoral fellow. Cech’s presentation was part of the Celebrating Clayman Institute Authors series and was moderated by former Graduate Dissertation Fellow Monique Harrison. Nichols completed her PhD in sociology in June 2023.

The Myra Strober Prize recognizes a popular, high-quality article written by a Stanford graduate or undergraduate student for Gender News, the Clayman Institute’s newsletter. Each article is also published on the Institute's website.  The award is named for Myra Strober, a labor economist and professor emerit at the School of Education and at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University (by courtesy). Strober is the founding director of the Clayman Institute for Gender Research (then the Center for Research on Women). She is the author of numerous books, including Interdisciplinary Conversations: Challenging Habits of Thought (2010) and Sharing the Work: What My Family and Career Taught Me about Breaking Through (and Holding the Door Open for Others) (2016) as well as her new book (co-authored with Abby Davisson), Money and Love: An Intelligent Roadmap for Life’s Biggest Decisions (2023).