Shelley Joyce Correll is an American sociologist. She is the Michelle Mercer and Bruce Golden Family Professor of Women’s Leadership
Director at Stanford University.
Early life and education
Correll was born and raised in Houston, Texas, to a police officer father and stay-at-home mother, neither of whom went to college. Growing up, her family was big fans of the Houston Astros and she saw games played in the Astrodome. Upon earning her Bachelor of Arts degree from Texas A&M University, Correll became a high school chemistry teacher while also interning at Dow Chemical Company and taking master’s levels classes in sociology at the University of Houston. She noticed that the boys in her chemistry class were undeterred by setbacks while the girls lacked confidence to believe they were good at chemistry in spite of good grades. Correll was encouraged by one of her professors to apply for a PhD in sociology and received a full scholarship to Stanford University. Her thesis was focused on "the way that stereotypes about fields affect the extent to which men and women come to see themselves as being skilled in that area." While working towards her thesis, she earned funding from Stanford's Institute for Research on Women and Gender to study why women and men end up in sex-segregated fields or specialties.
Career
From 2003 to 2009, Corell taught at Cornell, following a two-year stint at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Upon accepting the position, she co-led a gender-equity directive called CU-ADVANCE, with funding from the National Science Foundation. The aim of the initiative was to recruit more women for engineering and science faculty positions. One of the results of this directive found that women were underrepresented at Cornell's sciences, engineering, social science, behavioral science, and math programs and felt less satisfied in their positions.
As co-director of the Advancing Cornell's Commitment to Excellence and Leadership, Correll also began developing the Motherhood penalty theory, which argued that women with children were considered less competent and dedicated than their childless or male coworkers. Working alongside graduate student Stephen Benard, they authored Getting a Job: Is There a Motherhood Penalty? and Cognitive Bias and the Motherhood Penalty. They surveyed paid undergraduate student-volunteers to evaluate fake resumes and determine which person would be the best to head a new marketing department.
