Kwan Woo Kim

I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Higher Education, Race, and the Economy (HERE) Lab at the University of California, Merced. I received my Ph.D. in Sociology from Harvard University in 2023.

My research examines organizational mechanisms of inequality. I ask how the resource environments that organizations depend on shape which groups gain ground in their workforces, and which stall.

In my latest project, Selective Inclusion, I examine the diversification of the U.S. professoriate across 693 colleges and universities between 1993 and 2019. As the Ph.D. pipeline diversifies, academic institutions are expected to employ faculties that mirror it. Yet they diverge sharply from one another. The reason, I argue, is resource dependence: organizations facing different resource environments expand the fields and demographic groups perceived as most capable of securing core resources, creating uneven and segregated trajectories of workforce diversification.

A second line of work asks the same question outside the university, in creative industries where critics and studios function as gatekeepers. I also study the horizontal stratification of higher education, college majors exposed to AI, and European workers’ attitudes toward welfare and immigration. For more details on these projects, check the Research page.