Kim de Laat is a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Gender and the Economy. She earned her PhD in Sociology at the University of Toronto. Her research agenda is concerned with the organizational and cultural forces that limit or enable individuals. Her dissertation uses mixed methods to study the organizational factors affecting creativity in the music industry as it transitioned from the production of CDs to MP3s. Other research projects have used in-depth interviews and content analysis to study the impact of internships as an organizational form, and the development of cultural schemas that produce and reproduce gender inequality.
Her current SSHRC-funded project extends her interest in culture and organizations to a consideration of gender inequality in the workplace. She will be conducting a comparative organizational ethnography in order to examine how numerical representation interacts with workplace culture to affect the efficacy of family-friendly workplace policies.
Learn more about Kim and her research in the video below from our “Meet a Fellow” series!