This is the 61st article in Bears Doing Big Things, a weekly column celebrating the stories of notable M-A alumni.
“I think there is a direct line between trying to understand my experiences at M-A—a frankly unequal institution—and me now seeking to study and share knowledge about forces of inequality,” said Marianne Cooper ‘91. Cooper is a sociologist at Stanford’s VMware Women’s Leadership Innovation Lab and works to turn her research into action through writing and public speaking.
At M-A, Cooper was on both the soccer and dance teams. She said, “You didn’t have to do a lot when I was there. Now, I feel like there are more hoops to jump through.”
In Joe Hasbrook’s AP European History class, she remembered: “He created a fictional country—which was actually mirroring the difficult economic conditions that Germany faced post World War I—and had us vote on different political leaders after explaining their economic agendas. The candidate that ended up getting the most votes was one mirroring Hitler. That class taught me that conditions affect the choices that people make, and I think that lesson really stuck with me.”
Cooper also recalled her summer trip to Europe with that same history class. “I joke that there’s not enough money in the world to pay me to take a group of high schoolers to Europe, but he did it very willingly. We had a great time seeing all of the places we studied in class,” she said.
After graduating from M-A, Cooper attended UC San Diego (UCSD). UCSD models Oxford University, with interdisciplinary colleges that focus on broad topics like American identity or individual responsibility. She started as a political science major at Fifth College (now Eleanor Roosevelt College)—which focuses on global awareness—with the intention of going to law school.
There, Cooper took a two-year course called Making of the Modern World, which she described as a “combination of History, Sociology, Religious Studies, and Economics.” Based on her interest in the wide range of complex topics discussed in that class, Cooper decided she wanted to design her own interdisciplinary major. But then she found sociology.
“I took my introductory Sociology course and it was like a lightning bolt hit me,” she said. “It was making sense of a lot of the things that I started noticing at M-A, which are systems of inequality.”
I took my introductory Sociology course and it was like a lightning bolt hit me.
She added, “I kept taking more classes on women’s studies and the way inequality works. Inequality is so normalized, it’s become like background music that’s on all the time. Once you become aware of it and you see it more, you start to have a lot of questions.”
She continued taking classes to learn about “why things are the way they are,” eventually obtaining a PhD in Sociology from UC Berkeley.
At Berkeley, Cooper worked with Professor Arlie Hochschild, who led her toward public sociology—an approach that aims to communicate with a wider audience. “As much as I love the academic world, things often stay in the ‘ivory tower.’ I felt like, ‘What’s the point of studying something and writing an article that only 20 other academics will read?’”
Cooper is now a Senior Research Scholar at Stanford’s VMware Women’s Leadership Innovation Lab studies gender bias with a focus on advancing women’s leadership. Currently, Cooper is focusing on the shift to hybrid work and its implications for women.
This work isn’t easy. “Most social problems are very complicated, which is why we haven’t solved them yet. Some pretty big factors explain a lot of it, but it’s often really complicated. As a sociologist, you take a piece of it and you study it in a few different ways. There are fields, like the sociology of gender or family, and from there you find a discipline and focus on some specific questions,” Cooper explained.
A large part of Cooper’s work is ‘translating’ research into public sociology. She said, “I read through a body of research about a particular issue that may not be my field of study at the moment and translate it into something the public can understand. I do that to raise awareness because so many things could be improved and better understood based on sociologists’ research.”
“Many times, I’ll give a talk or write something and people will say, ‘I’ve had that experience, I didn’t know that that’s what it was.’ There’s a lot of power in naming those kinds of experiences because usually people think they’re alone when, in reality, they’re just individual moments of much larger social patterns,” she said.
Many times, I’ll give a talk or write something and people will say, ‘I’ve had that experience, I didn’t know that that’s what it was.’ There’s a lot of power in naming those kinds of experiences because usually people think they’re alone when, in reality, they’re just individual moments of much larger social patterns.
On the importance of writing clearly, Cooper said, “Regardless of what you want to do, whether it’s sociology or business, you have to be able to think clearly and create coherent and persuasive arguments. You often have lots of stuff you want to say, and distilling down the main points you want to make, the order of those points, and how to make it super compelling and interesting is a difficult skill set that you probably won’t fully master in high school.”
Cooper’s 2014 book, Cut Adrift: Families in Insecure Times, explores economic inequality’s impact on families. She said, “Over the last several decades, there’s been increasing income inequality, but also alongside that is growing economic insecurity—people losing jobs more and often being unable to find jobs that pay them the same amount. I looked at how people are coping with that up and down the class ladder. I did interviews and participant observation with families of all classes, the idea being that these forces don’t just impact your bank account, they impact how you think and feel and how you go through the day.”
She continued, “I’m really passionate about enabling sociological ideas to travel as far as they can because I think it will make the world a better place.”
Cooper’s advice to M-A students: “From both my personal experience and the research I did for my book, there is a lot of pressure and stress on students because of hyper-competitiveness to get into college but life is a much longer journey. Also, just because something is hard doesn’t mean that it’s not your thing, so don’t close off certain paths for yourself just because you’re not quite there yet.”
Cooper’s advice to students interested in sociology: “Look for sociologists who are talking about things you’re interested in and start reading the papers they write. Sociology isn’t as well known to people as history or psychology, so I don’t think that many people grow up thinking they want to be a sociologist. But if you’re interested in social problems, deeply concerned about injustice, and want to create a better world, then sociology has a lot to offer.”
Learn more about Cooper and her work here.
