Lauren A. Rivera

Lauren A. Rivera is an American sociologist and management scholar. She is the Peter G. Peterson Professor of Corporate Ethics and a professor of management and organizations at the Kellogg School of Management of Northwestern University. She also holds a courtesy appointment as a professor of sociology in Northwestern University's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. Her research includes hiring and evaluation practices in elite organizations.

Education

Rivera received a Bachelor of Arts degree in psychology and sociology from Yale University in 2000.

Academic career

Rivera joined the Kellogg School of Management in 2009 as an assistant professor. She became a professor of management and organizations in 2020. In 2023, she was named the Peter G. Peterson Chair in Corporate Ethics. Rivera is a Faculty Associate at Northwestern University Institute for Policy Research. Rivera is a Faculty Affiliate at the University of Chicago's Stone Center for Research on Wealth Inequality and Mobility.

Research

Rivera's research is in the sociology of work, organization studies, and social stratification. It examines how employers, schools, and other institutions evaluate individuals and distribute educational and occupational opportunities. Her work has addressed the roles of social class, gender, disability, race, and intersectionality in employment and education. Her 2015 book, Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs, examines recruitment and hiring at elite firms, including the role of cultural matching in access to professional careers.

Her research has also examined how social class and gender affect organizational evaluation. In a 2016 field experiment involving large law firms, Rivera and András Tilcsik found that men from higher-class backgrounds were more likely to receive interview invitations than otherwise comparable applicants.

Rivera has also researched academic hiring, diversity recruitment, and educational access. Her 2017 article on gender and relationship-status discrimination in faculty recruitment examined how assumptions about geographic mobility affected hiring evaluations. In research on diversity recruitment, she found that candidates from underrepresented groups were recruited at comparable rates but faced different outcomes during subsequent stages of the hiring process.