Graduate Students on the Job Market

Committee:
William G. Axinn (chair)
Margaret Frye
Alexandra Killewald
Dirgha J. Ghimire
Natasha Pilkauskas

I am a sociologist and demographer studying the dynamic relationship between population and social change, family ties, and well-being across the life course. My dissertation project examines the transition to adulthood through the lens of siblings, a group that is conspicuously understudied in social research.

My dissertation theorizes siblinghood as a distinctive social tie that fuses shared family origins with a common biographical generation. I argue that siblings’ unique social location provides novel analytic leverage for studying the social embeddedness of life trajectories. Across three empirical chapters, I investigate how siblings shape family formation, sexual behavior, and intergenerational dynamics in Nepal, combining over thirty years of longitudinal data from the Chitwan Valley Family Study (CVFS) with original relationship quality measures from a survey that I designed and implemented among CVFS sibling pairs. My findings show that siblings’ transitions to adulthood are temporally interdependent and jointly shaped by their dyadic relationships and shared family backgrounds. Overall, this project establishes siblings as a fundamental yet overlooked source of social influence, demonstrating how attention to horizontal kinship can deepen our understanding of life course processes.

Beyond my dissertation, I maintain several active research collaborations on a variety of topics, including cross-national family change, mental health and the life course, and gender and culture. My recent work has appeared in Journal of Marriage and Family, Demographic Research, and Social Science & Medicine. My doctoral research has been supported by an NICHD predoctoral traineeship and the Roblin Predoctoral Fellowship Award.

Committee:
Jaeeun Kim (Chair)
Geneviève Zubrzycki
Greta Krippner
Pauline Jones (Political Science)

Jeffrey Bilik is a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of Michigan. His research builds on the sociology of immigration, citizenship, and law to investigate how processes of commodification reshape migrants’ legal status and welfare. He draws on multi-sited fieldwork, interviews, and archival methods to trace how the mass privatization of housing in formerly socialist societies has turned the home into an arena for negotiating and contesting migrant legality.

Although Russia is one of the most popular migration destinations in the world, migrants find it nearly impossible to obtain and maintain legal status, exposing them to the constant threat of arrests, fines, and deportation. Bilik traces part of the origin of this grey legal space to the privatization of formerly state-owned housing, which transferred the administration of household registration from public authorities to individual homeowners. In socialist and post-socialist countries, individuals’ legal status typically hinges on official documentation of the address where they reside by the owner or manager of that address, a process called registration. In the Soviet era, the state-owned firms that managed migrant housing harnessed the infrastructure of registration to cultivate productive workers. Today, however, homeowners skirt the requirement of registration which leaves migrant tenants legally precarious. Migrant housing, made illegal under this arrangement, thus becomes the target of police raids and surveillance by neighbors. Drawing on twelve months of fieldwork in Moscow, Russia and Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, 107 interviews with migrants, homeowners, rental agents, and municipal and federal archives on Soviet migrant labor, Bilik’s dissertation follows the historical evolution of housing as a central site for migrant legal status – from the late-Soviet management of migrant dormitories, to the rise of Russia’s mass homeownership society, to contemporary landlords’ decision-making around migrant household registration and the everyday negotiation of illegality and trespass that migrants in Russia face at home. Though the home is viewed as a sanctuary in Western contexts, this socialist-era legal regime subjects migrants to policing in their living spaces, projecting the border into their homes. The dissertation sheds light on the powerful administrative role of private housing for reproducing migrant illegality across socialist and post-socialist countries.

Bilik’s research has been published in Comparative Studies in Society and History and the Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (with collaborators from the U-M School of Information and department of Computer Science & Engineering). His dissertation work has been supported by the Harriman Institute at Columbia University, the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, a Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship, and multiple institutions at the University of Michigan.

More information on Bilik’s research and CV is available on his website: jeff-bilik.github.io.

Committee:

• Alexandra Killewald (co-chair)
• Fabian Pfeffer (co-chair)
• Deirdre Bloome
• Greta Krippner
• Davon Norris

More information:
Website
CV

About the candidate:
Davis Daumler is a sociologist who studies wealth, poverty, and families—in order to understand the process by which societies become economically and racially stratified. His research is embedded in several literatures, including: (1) stratification and social mobility; (2) economic sociology; (3) racial/ethnic inequality; and (4) demographic and quantitative methods.

Dissertation project:
Even though families are experiencing rising levels of economic insecurity and volatility across the life course, racial and economic inequalities have remained remarkably stable over time. Daumler's dissertation is motivated by a desire to understand how the temporality of life experiences contributes to social stratification. It is not just what happens to you that matters, but when something occurs and how long it lasts. The central argument of Daumler's project is that differences in temporality—over the life course and across historical time—are fundamental for explaining how year-to-year inequalities become rigidly stratified. Each paper of Daumler's dissertation addresses a different facet of this theoretical argument, by investigating the role of temporal dynamics in the contexts of intergenerational poverty and family wealth accumulation. The first chapter of Daumler's dissertation won the 2023 Robert D. Mare Graduate Student Paper Award from the ASA Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility section.

Committee:
Elizabeth Bruch (Chair)
Jeffrey Morenoff (Sociology & Public Policy)
Fabian Pfeffer (Sociology)
Robert Manduca (Sociology)
Joffre Swait (Erasmus School of Health Policy & Management)

Elly Field is a quantitative sociologist and demographer with a focus on how individual choices intersect with macro-level policies and social structures to shape racial and economic inequality. Her research uses cutting edge quantitative methods and original data collection using GIS, longitudinal administrative data, and survey experiments. In her primary research area, she investigates how the structural link between schools and neighborhoods created by school district policies shapes racial segregation dynamics. Her work explores how school policies shape parents’ decisions about where to live and where to send their children to school and identifies the implications of those decisions for neighborhood and school segregation. School district attendance policies assign students to schools based on where they live, tying school segregation to neighborhood segregation. However, while both parents and scholars have long understood the importance of these school district policies, research has not fully considered the implications of these policies for individual preferences, mobility decisions, and population change. Her ongoing work examines how these policies affect demographic change occurring in schools and neighborhoods as linked contexts, as well as how school districts respond to the release of court-ordered desegregation policies. Elly’s work informs sociological theory on population dynamic, education, and racial inequality. Her research has been published in the American Journal of Sociology, Demography, and Social Forces.

Elly Field is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Population Studies and Training Center at Brown University. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship, the National Institutes of Child Health and Human Development Graduate Fellowship, and the American Sociological Association/NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant.

More information and CV are available at: ellymfield.com

Committee:
Karin A. Martin (Chair)
Alford A. Young, Jr.
Fatma Müge Göçek
Elizabeth R. Cole

Taylor is a qualitative sociologist who studies gender, race, sexuality, and family — to understand how selfhood is constructed both within and beyond prescribed identity boundaries and how personal meaning is made from broader social categories.

Between 2010 and 2020, the multiracial population increased 276 percent according to the U.S. Census. Likewise, in 2022, the largest national study of transgender people in the U.S. found that nonbinary individuals comprised 38 percent of the trans population. Of the limited research that attends to either of these populations, the focus is predominantly on white nonbinary people and cisgender multiracial people. Grounded in indigenous research principles of reciprocity and relationality, Field Quiroga partnered with 56 individuals who identify as both nonbinary and multiracial, for her dissertation research and book project.

Drawing on these interviews, Field Quiroga argues for the use of assemblage theory and intersectionality to understand the ways race and gender mutually inform and co-construct each other in the experiences of participants. Tensions of temporality and decoloniality produce race and gender as both distinct and inextricable social categories. Field Quiroga examines multiple conceptualizations of nonbinary gender, which can be understood variably as between genders (liminal), both genders (hybrid), a “secret third thing,” and/or neither gender. Consistent in all models is an understanding of identity as contextual, fluid, and dynamic. Particularly in experiences with sex and dating, the weight of others’ perceptions can reinforce categorical confines, prompting participants to navigate romantic and sexual relationships through a new desirability politic. The ongoing book project based on this research will additionally focus on biological and chosen family, neurodivergence and disability, religion and spirituality, and the role of the COVID-19 lockdowns.

Taylor Field Quiroga’s research has been supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship, Institute for Research on Women and Gender, Rackham Graduate School, and departmental grants. She has published in Journal of GLBT Family Studies and in an edited volume Contemporary Parenting and Parenthood.

Please email tfield@umich.edu for more information.

Committee:
Elizabeth Armstrong (Co-chair)
Deidre Bloome (Co-chair)
Fabian Pfeffer
Kevin Stange (Public Policy)
Gongjun Xu (Statistics)

Jane Furey uses computational, demographic, and experimental techniques to investigate how education reduces, expands, or maintains inequality within and across generations. In one strand of work, she examines education attained after age 25, which she refers to as educational upgrading. Upgrading may reduce earlier established educational inequalities if it provides “second chances” for disadvantaged individuals to catch-up over the life course. Or, upgrading may expand inequalities, if it allows already-advantaged individuals to pull further ahead. Across several papers, Dr. Furey determines the extent to which upgrading reshapes racial, gender, and class inequalities within and across cohorts. She also asks whether the economic and health benefits of a college degree depend on when in the life course that degree is completed.

In a second strand of research, Dr. Furey investigates the relationship between education policy and inequality. Using administrative data and experimental and quasi-experimental techniques, she has estimated the effects of policy interventions on educational achievement and inequality in Texas, Massachusetts, Michigan, and North Carolina. In a third strand of research, Dr. Furey focuses on the role education plays in racial stratification and social mobility. Taken together, Dr. Furey’s work highlights that the relationship between education and stratification is dynamic, often depending on social and historical circumstances over the life course and over time.

Dr. Furey is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Population Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. She completed her PhD in Public Policy and Sociology, along with a Master’s degree in Statistics, at the University of Michigan in 2025. Her research has been supported by the NAEd/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship, the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, and a National Institutes of Child Health and Human Development graduate traineeship. She has published in the American Sociological Review, Research on Social Stratification and Mobility, the Russell Sage Foundation Journal of Social Sciences, and AERA Open, among other outlets. Her research has received awards from the ASA Sections on Race, Gender and Class, Population, and Aging and the Life Course, as well as from the Sociology of Education interest group of the American Education Research Association.

Additional information (including an up-to-date CV) can be found on her website: janeluisefurey.com.

Committee:
Jaeeun Kim (Co-Chair)
Barbara Anderson (Co-Chair)
Erin Cech (Sociology)
Fatma Müge Göçek (Sociology)
Gayle Rubin (Anthropology)

Interest Areas: sexuality, sex/gender, migration, urban sociology
Methodologies: ethnographic and qualitative interview

Chelle Jones (they/them) studies gender and sexuality and is a doctoral candidate at the University of Michigan with certificates in LGBTQ Studies and in Teaching. Jones expects to graduate in April 2025. Jones’ research agenda focuses on how the intersection of gender and sexuality with other statuses such as national origin, class, and race influences the life trajectories of LGBTQ migrants in South Korea. Much of the literature on queer migration has attempted to isolate the effects of sexuality on migration in order to theorize how migration processes affect LGBTQ people. However, this approach obscures important insights offered by an intersectional perspective attentive to sexuality, gender, race, class, and national origin. Jones’ dissertation examines how trans, gender nonconforming, and lesbian, bisexual and queer women (LBTQ) skilled labor migrants in South Korea negotiate different social and policy regimes governing sexual minority and migrant’s rights, as they pursue employment and/or maintain mixed citizenship relationships abroad.

Jones shows that persistent cisheteronormativity in both migration and family reunification policies constrains LBTQ families unable to achieve full legal recognition even after they marry legally in one country. Jones argues that Korea proves to be a desirable destination for LBTQ migrants because its skilled labor recruitment policies make it accessible, whereas cisheteronormative and socioeconomic discrimination, or strict immigration limits make other desired destinations with better legal protections for LGBTQ people inaccessible. Compared to ‘LGBTQ-friendly’ destinations in the West, Korea’s comparatively low bar for ‘skilled’ labor migration enables college educated LBTQ people to stay together even without legal recognition and accumulate resources to settle in their desired destinations in the future.

Jones won Fulbright and other grants to spend 16 months studying South Korea’s queer communities. Jones has published in International Migration Review, the Journal of Lesbian Studies, and is under review at Gender and Society.

Committee:
Sarah Burgard (Co-Chair)
Maggie Frye (Co-Chair)
Barbara Anderson
Cheryl Moyer
Yun Zhou

More information
Website
CV

Research Interests
Fertility behaviors, Maternal health, Sexual and reproductive health and rights, HIV prevention technologies, and Mental health

Dissertation project
Uganda is among the many sub-Saharan African countries that criminalize and highly restrict safe abortion care. This criminalization and restriction block women from accessing essential healthcare, pushing them into harm’s way. So, if we know that the criminalization and restriction of abortion do not necessarily stop women from having abortions, how are people navigating these realities around abortion in Uganda? Through this inquiry, I have illustrated how Uganda, being a collectivist society, is experiencing a slow transition toward more egalitarian attitudes toward abortion even among highly educated individuals. One of the critical indications this establishment points to is the inevitable stigma that comes with seeking or providing an abortion in such a society. However, an important finding to note is how women in this context have relied on their social networks to build deviance and agency to evade stigma and access safe abortion care. Nonetheless, the fruition of this deviance and agency comes with a financial obligation to women that suppliers of abortion leverage as a safeguard against the risks of providing abortions amid criminalization and restrictions. In circumstances where a woman cannot meet that financial obligation, their care needs are dismissed. This inquiry demonstrates that people in Uganda navigate the realities around abortion through two core sources of social power: social capital and socioeconomic status. Therefore, to ensure sexual and reproductive health equity among girls and women, an economically sustainable, comprehensive, and progressive law on abortion is necessary. Katulamu’s dissertation inquiry broadly speaks to our understanding of health inequality through distinct contributions to culture theory, stigma theory, symbolic interactionism, and illicit market theory.

Postdoctoral fellowship
Beginning in September 2026, Katulamu has accepted a two-year Impact Scholars postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Global Health Equity at the University of Michigan. During this time, Katulamu will focus on advancing HIV prevention by improving uptake of existing HIV prevention technologies and emerging vaccines. Sub-Saharan African countries have exhibited a strong fight against HIV/AIDS, albeit with challenges, including the recent aid cuts. Despite these challenges, Uganda is among the countries that are close to achieving the 95-95-95 global HIV target by 2030; however, the rising new infections among adolescent girls and young women are about to reverse this achievement. My research aims to design sustainable, user-friendly mobile technologies that can improve uptake of existing and emerging prevention technologies, such as the recent injectable lenacapavir.

Committee:
Roi Livne (Co-Chair)
Terri Friedline (Co-Chair)
Celeste Watkins-Hayes
H. Luke Shaefer
Jeff Morenoff

Research Interests: poverty & inequality, science, knowledge & technology, medical sociology/health, social stratification, economic sociology/labor, and social policy

Analidis Ochoa is a PhD Candidate in Sociology and Social Work. She uses mixed methods to understand how advancements in biotechnology that promise to improve the quality of life of patients also exacerbate social inequality. Her current work focuses on the for-profit market for human blood plasma in the United States.

Analidis’ dissertation and book project examines the emergence of paid blood plasma as a viable economic coping strategy in the United States. As therapeutic uses of human blood plasma have expanded, driven by an aging population more prone to autoimmune and inflammatory diseases, the global demand for blood plasma derived medicines has skyrocketed. Over 70% of the world’s blood plasma is sourced by paid donors in the US, where unlike in most countries, people can earn hundreds of dollars each month by giving plasma up to twice per week. By integrating analysis of spatial, survey and interview data, Analidis examines the geographic expansion of for-profit plasma collection centers in the US and explores the motivations and experiences of paid blood plasma donors. Her findings reveal that the plasma donor population may be more heterogeneous than previously understood— while paid plasma donation has traditionally been viewed as a practice reserved for low-income people, middle-income earners engage in paid plasma donation as well. People use the money earned to keep up with bills, which have increased due to inflation and rising living costs. While donors often experience side effects, ranging from blackouts to bruising, and worry about long-term health effects, they often continue giving plasma because they need the money. This work extends our understanding of how growing economic inequality has made paid plasma donation a more palatable option for middle-income people, how donors perceive of the transactional nature of this exchange, and the extent to which engaging in this practice may exacerbate health disparities and social inequality.

Analidis is a 2025 Visiting Fellow with the Boston Federal Reserve. Her research has been funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and various institutes at the University of Michigan. Her collaborative work has been published in Social Service Review, Sociological Focus, and the Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare. Her work on the blood plasma industry has been featured and/or cited in The Washington Post, CNBC, Wisconsin Public Radio, and The Telegraph.

More information:
Website

Committee:
Alexandra (Sasha) Killewald, University of Michigan (Sociology, Co-chair)
Lauren Duquette-Rury, Wayne State University (Sociology, Co-chair)
Alexandra Murphy, University of Michigan (Sociology)
Fabiana Silva, University of Michigan (Public Policy)
Fabian Pfeffer, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Müchen (Sociology)

I am a multi-method sociologist, and my research engages broadly with ethno-racial stratification, immigration, and urban/regional dynamics. My research interests lie on how these areas intersect with the experiences of Latino and Latino immigrants in the United States. My dissertation, Placing the American Dream: Latino geographic dispersion, socioeconomic well-being, and belonging across the American Landscape, is guided by the overarching question: how important is place for the socioeconomic well-being and incorporation of Latino immigrants?

My dissertation encompasses three projects. Using U.S. Census data, the first project focuses on the spatial dispersion for recently arrived Latinos across the United States and how immigrant destinations have changed over time. There are two contributions from this project. First, changes for recent Latino immigrant destinations not only vary across destination types, but also vary by Latino subgroups, suggesting new Latino diasporas than previously examined. Second, I find that the spatial dispersion of recent Latino immigrants has stalled since the 2008 recession and continued stalling at the start of rising anti-immigration legislations across the United States in 2010. My second project uses U.S. Census data and state legislation data to investigates how restrictive immigration legislations across the United States affects the socioeconomic well-being of Latino immigrants. Specifically, I demonstrate how sub-national policies, especially across the U.S. South, has complex effects on the socioeconomic well-being of Latinos, with effects varying by demographic characteristics such as citizenship status, country of origin, and years spent in the country. My third project interrogates how Latino immigrants establish a sense of belonging in geographies with historically Black and White majority populations in Southeastern Tennessee. Using interview and observational data, I argue that placemaking, ethno-racial identity formation, and engagement with local institutions are interwoven in the degree to which Latino immigrants form a sense of belonging in their communities.

My dissertation project has been funded internally by the University of Michigan and the Population Studies Center/National Institutes of Child Health and Human Development Graduate Fellowship, as well as the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, The Russell Sage Foundation, and The American Sociological Association/NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant. More information on my ongoing work is available on my website: giovannifromantorres.com

Committee:

Sarah Burgard (Co-chair)
Luke Shaefer (Co-chair)
Natasha Pilkauskas
Scott Allard (University of Washington Evans School of Public Policy)

Research Interests: Sociology of poverty, sociology of inequality, human services programs, rural sociology, social determinants of health

Shoshana Shapiro researches poverty, inequality, and the social safety net as a National Poverty Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. Her National Poverty Fellowship placement is in the Office of Community Services (OCS) in the Administration for Children and Families. Shapiro’s research agenda focuses on the geography of poverty and access to the human services safety net. Using quantitative analysis of national administrative data, Shapiro finds that rural, Black, Hispanic, and Latino communities are intersectionally underserved by the nonprofit human services safety net after controlling for other possible covariates. Although the effect is explained by geographic factors, county-level poverty is also associated with lower rates of nonprofit human services expenditures. Another line of research uses a mixed-methods research design to gather information about possible human services deserts. This project will create the first systematic study of human services deserts. Shapiro’s dissertation findings show that the distribution of nonprofit human services is largely wrong: nationally, services to address poverty are going disproportionately to the wealthiest counties and regions, while communities of color, rural counties, and poor counties are underserved. This research on the sociology of inequality illustrates how market-based social safety nets worsen macrospatial inequality.

A third line of research for Shapiro’s postdoctoral placement focuses on how OCS programs serve vulnerable populations, including Americans experiencing poverty, rural Americans, and Americans of color. This line of research applies her broader research agenda to federal antipoverty human services programs, including the Community Services Block Grant, which funds over 1000 Community Action Agencies nationwide. This research informs policy and programmatic decisions in the federal human services safety net.

Shapiro’s work has been published in Social Service Review, the American Journal of Public Health (with collaborators from the U-M Policies for Action Research Hub), and the Journal of Primary Care and Community Health (with collaborators from the U-M Center for Improving Patient and Population Health). She has received grants in support of this research from the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy, Poverty Solutions at the University of Michigan, the National Science Foundation, and the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

Committee:
Sarah Burgard (Chair)
Alexandra Killewald
Natasha Quadlin
Ben Hansen (Statistics)

Janet Wang is a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of Michigan. She is pursuing a master’s degree in Statistics. Janet is a demographer and quantitative sociologist whose research spans the subfields of aging and the life course, work and occupations, and social stratification. Her research uses longitudinal survey data and innovative statistical methods to explore labor market misalignment across the career and its role in inequality-generating processes.

Janet’s dissertation examines the growing number of US workers who are overqualified, workers who possess education credentials that surpass their occupations’ educational requirements. Janet incorporates the life course framework, social psychology and epidemiological perspectives, and demographic methods across three chapters to examine how and why overqualification matters for 1) individual outcomes as workers age and 2) aggregate patterns of economic, social, and health inequality. In one paper, Janet analyzes how exposure to overqualification unfolds across the career trajectory for a cohort of collegegoers and how overqualification contributes to racial wage gaps across the life course. In another manuscript, she uses time-use data to estimate the emotional tolls of overqualification and understand how time spent at work shapes employee wellbeing in the new economy. Her final paper examines differences in later life cognitive functioning and asks how overqualification may complicate the well-documented association between educational attainment and later life health. Together, these papers show how occupational opportunities shape inequality across multiple domains of wellbeing in the short- and long-term for US workers.

Additionally, Janet examines later life income stratification, employment patterns of older workers, and life course data quality in solo and collaborative projects. Janet’s work has been funded by the Population Studies Center, the Stone Center for Inequality Dynamics, and Poverty Solutions at the University of Michigan, as well as the National Institutes of Aging Graduate Fellowship.

Committee:

Greta Krippner (Chair)
Paige Sweet
Roi Livne
Lisa Nakamura (Digital Studies)

More information:
[Website] | [CV]

About the candidate:

Jun Zhou is a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of Michigan, with a graduate certificate in Science, Technology, and Society (STS). Spanning economic sociology, gender, labor, technology, and social theory, her research is unified by an interest in the gendered foundations of political economy. A historical and comparative ethnographer, she pairs fieldwork with archival research to ask how the digital revolution is remaking women’s labor, and with it, inequality and family life. Her research has been supported by the Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship, which recognizes pathbreaking dissertation research in the humanities and interpretive social sciences, the Henry Luce Foundation, and the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation. Her scholarship has received nine paper awards, including from the ASA Sex and Gender, Economic Sociology, Science, Knowledge and Technology, and CITAMS sections, Sociologists for Women in Society, and the LaborTech Research Network. Her teaching has been recognized with the Rackham Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award, Michigan’s university-wide teaching honor.

Dissertation project:

Across China, the rise of platform work and the historic retreat from marriage and childbearing have arrived together. Zhou locates part of the source of China’s demographic transformation inside the transformation of women’s work itself, through a process she calls the “metricization of work”: the reorganization of labor around continuous measurement, in which every act of work is counted as it happens, converted into a score, and governed by the score it produces. Her empirical entry point is China’s live-commerce industry, real-time video selling grown into a trillion-dollar sector and the largest platform employer of women in the world. Drawing on five years of research, including fifteen months of fieldwork in Hangzhou, China, embedded work as a livestreaming assistant, 141 interviews, and historical archives of the factory and service eras, the dissertation traces metricization across four sites: the labor market platform firms design, the gendered labor performed inside them, the automation of that labor by AI, and its reach into intimate life. Together, the chapters show how the digitalization of work remakes not only how women labor but how they hold the future. Articles from the dissertation are published in Work and Occupations and Big Data & Society. Zhou’s master’s research on the state-enforced boundary between work and family is revised and resubmitted at Socio-Economic Review.