Three doctoral students earn Institute prizes
The Clayman Institute recognizes three Stanford doctoral students with academic prizes for 2024. These exceptional students’ work demonstrated notable contributions to gender scholarship through their research and writing.
Emma Williams-Baron was selected as the 2024 Marjorie Lozoff Prize winner for her research on gender and race inequality in the labor market, with a focus on segregation, hiring bias, and interventions for increasing equity. Her dissertation comprises three areas of investigation. The first evaluates a research-informed intervention to address the well-known bias mothers experience during the job search. The second evaluates how the current gender and racial composition of an organization affects whether people from underrepresented backgrounds apply for jobs in that organization. The third looks at how holding multiple jobs affects the overall level of gender segregation in the workforce and the gender wage gap. Williams-Baron plans to complete her Ph.D. in sociology in Spring 2025.
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.
Lucy Stark was awarded the 2024 Marilyn Yalom prize for her research on the gendered dynamics of labor, childhood, and racialization. As a first year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History, Stark focuses on 18th and 19th century French colonial history across Saint-Domingue, Louisiana, and West Africa. In her research, Stark explores the childhood and apprenticeship of free children of color who migrated from Saint-Domingue to New Orleans. Her transnational project is one of the first to emphasize the presence of women and girls in craft apprenticeship, as previous scholarship focused only on young men who participated in this specialized training. Stark builds on histories of Haitian Revolution refugees, free people of color, and childhood studies.
The Marilyn Yalom award is bestowed annually to a currently enrolled Stanford Ph.D. 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.
Marianna Zhang received the 2024 Myra Strober Prize for her writing during her 2023-24 term as a graduate dissertation fellow at the Clayman Institute. Her article “Gender stereotypes contribute to misperceptions of gender norms across the world" covered a talk given by Professor of Economics Alessandra Voena. As a 2023-24 Clayman Institute faculty research fellow, Voena presented her study establishing the pervasiveness of gender norm misperceptions across the world and how they are context dependent. Zhang completed her Ph.D. in psychology in June 2024 and is currently a postdoctoral researcher at New York University.
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), Sharing the Work: What My Family and Career Taught Me about Breaking Through (and Holding the Door Open for Others) (2016), and Money and Love: An Intelligent Roadmap for Life’s Biggest Decisions (2023) (co-authored with Abby Davisson).
