I am a stratification sociologist whose recent research focuses on changing gender inequalities in the United States and India. With Dave Cotter and Joan Hermsen, I have been trying to understand why the U.S. gender revolution of the 1970s and 1980s stalled in the 1990s.

I am in the early stages of a text mining project to study the cultural origins of the stalled gender revolution. Three core themes – distressed working mothers, opting out, and mommy wars – have been coded using traditional content analyses for over 2000 articles from three U.S. newspapers between 1980-2015. Each theme rose dramatically in the mid-1990s when many gender equality indicators plateaued. These coded texts are being used to train a computer coding protocol that will enable extension of the sample to hundreds of thousands of articles: back to 1950, across newspapers from many more geographic areas, and based on a larger, more randomized sample for each year.