Bethany J. Nichols

Bethany J. Nichols is a research associate at the Clayman Institute. As a research associate, Nichols leads research initiatives on gender-based violence, intersectional inequalities, and feminism.  

Nichols is a social stratification and gender scholar. Her personal research builds an innovative sociology of trauma that investigates how, and under what social conditions, trauma shapes the economic well-being of individuals. Specifically, she examines how people are economically resilient in the face of trauma. She is currently writing a book manuscript based upon these research studies. In a separate research stream, she examines how inequality is produced and maintained in the evaluative processes that mediate an individual's access to valued socioeconomic outcomes, such as college admissions and workplace hiring. Her research is published at Work and Occupations and Sociological Perspectives as well as featured in The Economist and The New York Times.  

Previously, Nichols was a graduate dissertation fellow at the Clayman Institute. Before coming to academia, she was a K-12 educator in New York City. She earned her PhD and MA in sociology from Stanford University, MA from Relay Graduate School of Education, and BA in sociology and government from Cornell University. View Nichols' CV.