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. Learn more >
Latest News
New publication published in Sociology Compass!
Disability and climate change: A critical realist model of climate justice
by Molly M. King and Maria A. Gregg
Our framework, the critical realist model of climate justice, reviews four elements: contextual and environmental features that cause vulnerability; adaptive capacity and resilience to climate change; perceptions of and information gathering about risk; and social action and policy.
Featured in:
How Science Beat the Virus and what it lost in the process by Ed Yong
January / February, 2021 cover story of The Atlantic
"Among scientists, as in other fields, women do more child care, domestic work, and teaching than men, and are more often asked for emotional support by their students. These burdens increased as the pandemic took hold, leaving women scientists “less able to commit their time to learning about a new area of study, and less able to start a whole new research project,” says Molly M. King, a sociologist at Santa Clara University. Women’s research hours fell by nine percentage points more than did men’s because of the pressures of COVID‑19. And when COVID‑19 created new opportunities, men grabbed them more quickly. In the spring, the proportion of papers with women as first authors fell almost 44 percent in the preprint repository medRxiv, relative to 2019. And published COVID‑19 papers had 19 percent fewer women as first authors compared with papers from the same journals in the previous year. Men led more than 80 percent of national COVID‑19 task forces in 87 countries. Male scientists were quoted four times as frequently as female scientists in American news stories about the pandemic."
