Graduate Students on the Job Market

Kylie M. Smith is a doctoral candidate in the Sociology Department at the University of Georgia. She earned her MA in Sociology from Indiana University of Pennsylvania in 2019 as well as a Graduate Certificate in Women’s Studies from the University of Georgia in 2022. Her research interests include social psychology, sex and gender, inequality, higher education, deviance and crime, and science, knowledge, and technology. She has taught several classes at the University of Georgia including Introductory Sociology (SOCI 1101), Social Psychology (SOCI 3730), and Sociology of Gender (SOCI 3280).

Kylie is interested in examining how gendered inequalities are created and persist in various contexts. Her dissertation specifically looks at how identity threat influences discriminatory behaviors in online environments. Through experimental methods, she is studying whether male gamers respond to gamer identity threat with discriminatory behavior and sexist attitudes towards women. She has received funding to support this research through the American Sociological Association’s Section on Social Psychology’s Graduate Student Investigator Award as well as through the University of Georgia’s Graduate School Summer Research Grant program and the Center for Research and Engagement in Diversity’s Red Seed Grant.

Kylie’s second main stream of research centers on the relationship between status and emotional labor. In her solo authored paper published in Emotions and Society, she examined how structural conditions influenced how STEM graduate students felt about their own emotional labor. This research demonstrated that relative status did seem to influence how participants felt about their own emotional labor. Additionally, gender and race mattered: when participants felt that they were performing emotional labor due to their marginalized status as women or people of color (or both), they felt negatively about the emotional labor they performed. This paper won the inaugural Tim Futing Liao Graduate Award in Sociology for Best Published Article from the University of Georgia’s Sociology Department as well as received an honorable mention for the Graduate Student Paper Award from ASA’s Section on the Sociology of Emotions.

From 2021-2022, Kylie served as the Managing Editor for Social Psychology Quarterly. Additionally, in the 2024-2025 academic year, Kylie is working with an interdisciplinary team on an NSF-funded project focused on teaching evaluation and change in STEM higher education.