Molly M. King
Who owns knowledge and how does this shape inequality?
I am a sociologist who studies knowledge inequalities and the implications of these inequalities for people's lives.
I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Santa Clara University. I received my Ph.D. and M.A. in Sociology from Stanford University in California. I hold a B.A. in Biology from Reed College in Portland, Oregon.
Latest News
New publication in Scientometrics
by Kjersten Bunker Whittington, Molly M. King, and Isabella Cingolani
This article studies gender disparities in scientific collaboration several countries and disciplines. Using network analysis on 1.2 million authors and 144 million co-authorship relationships, we look at how connected authors are, tendencies to author with same-gender collaborators, and the nature of men’s and women’s interdisciplinary and international ties. This is the first paper to take a global, multi-discipline approach to study gender patterns in collaboration without artificially restricting co-authorship networks.
New article in Nature Careers
Computer algorithms infer gender, race and ethnicity. Here's how to avoid their pitfalls
by Jeffrey W. Lockhart, Molly M. King and Christin Munsch
Studies of diversity in academic publishing arrive regularly in the scientific literature. But where do the data come from? In this column, we present the various challenges of demographic-prediction algorithms, and some best practices to minimize the harms based on our longer-form research article published in Nature Human Behaviour.
New publication in Nature Human Behavior
Name-Based Demographic Inference and the Unequal Distribution of Misrecognition
by Jeffrey W. Lockhart, Molly M. King and Christin Munsch
Academics and companies increasingly draw on large datasets to understand the social world, and name-based demographic ascription tools are widespread for imputing information that is often missing from these large datasets. We find substantial inequalities in how these tools misgender and misrecognize the race/ethnicity of authors, distributing erroneous ascriptions unevenly among other demographic traits.
New in Nature News & Views!
Self-publishing is Common among Academic-Journal Editors
by Molly M. King
An analysis of the publication records of academic editors shows that one-quarter of them publish 10% of their own papers in the journals they edit and reveals that fewer than 10% of editors-in-chief are women.
