Jina Lee

Assistant Professor of Sociology

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

I study how evaluation systems reproduce gender inequality in science and in cultural fields.

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Jina Lee, Assistant Professor of Sociology

About

Jina Lee is a sociologist who studies how seemingly objective evaluation systems reproduce social hierarchies. Using computational text analysis, bibliometric analysis, and experimental methods, her research asks: whose contributions are recognized as valuable, and whose are discounted? In science, she examines how knowledge claims and their reception are gendered. In cultural markets, she investigates how canonization processes embed gender biases. Across these contexts, her work reveals a consistent pattern: evaluation practices that appear meritocratic embed biases that disadvantage women and lower-status actors. Her research has been published in the American Sociological Review, Poetics, Socius, and Journal of Social Entrepreneurship.

Research Areas

Gender and Scientific Evaluation

How do gendered dynamics shape which scientific contributions get recognized, cited, and treated as authoritative?

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Gender, Culture, and Markets

How do canonization processes in literature and culture embed and reproduce gender hierarchies?

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Science and Academia

Scientific knowledge is shaped not only by what researchers study but by how scientific communities are organized. This line of work examine…

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Other Work

Not all evaluation concerns recognition or prestige. This work examines how social categorization and framing shape judgments of who deserve…

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Publications

Teaching

I teach undergraduate courses in sociology of culture, sociology of gender, social statistics, and technology and society. My courses emphasize critical thinking and the application of sociological frameworks to contemporary empirical questions.

Teaching →