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. She earned an AM in sociology from Harvard University in 2006 and completed a PhD in sociology there in 2009. Her doctoral dissertation was supervised by Michèle Lamont.
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. She holds a courtesy appointment as a professor of sociology in Northwestern University's Department of Sociology. 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.
Rivera has studied hiring and evaluation practices at elite professional-service firms. Her 2012 article “Hiring as Cultural Matching: The Case of Elite Professional Service Firms” examined how interviewers assessed candidates' leisure interests, educational experiences, and interpersonal styles alongside formal qualifications. 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. The study also identified gendered assumptions about family responsibilities as a factor affecting the evaluations of higher-class women. In a 2019 study, Rivera and Tilcsik examined how the design of rating scales and other formal evaluation instruments affected gender bias in personnel assessments.
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. Her later work has considered disability discrimination in educational access, including the treatment of students with disabilities in public-school admissions and in admissions practices at elite private schools.
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