Search People Result | Academic Influence

Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.

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School

Gender

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Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential female people in Sociology,

#251

Franziska Schutzbach

#80143

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (46 years)

Franziska Schutzbach is a gender researcher and sociologist living in Switzerland. Life and work Franziska Schutzbach studied sociology, media studies and gender studies at the University of Basel and graduated in 2008 with a masters degree. She defended her doctorate in 2019 at the Graduate School of Social Sciences at the University of Basel with her dissertation on "Population politics, gender and health. The example of the World Health Organization" .

#252

Sara McLanahan

#92946

Overall Influence

1940 - 2021 (81 years)

Sara McLanahan was an American sociologist. She is known for her work on the family as a major institution in the American stratification system. Her early work examined the consequences of divorce and remarriage for parents and children, and her later work focused on families formed by unmarried parents. She was interested in the effects of family structure on social inequality and the roles that public policies can play in addressing the needs of families and children.

#253

Anne Waldschmidt

#61502

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Anne Waldschmidt is a German sociologist. She is a professor at the University of Cologne and teaches disability studies and sociology and politics of rehabilitation. She holds the first university position for disability studies in German-speaking countries.

#254

Sasha Roseneil

#72789

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Sasha Roseneil is a group analyst and a psychoanalytic psychotherapist. Roseneil became the ninth vice chancellor of the University of Sussex in August 2022. Early life and education Roseneil obtained a 1st class BSc in economics from the London School of Economics, where she studied between 1985 and 1988 before undertaking a Ph.D. at the same institution. Roseneil's Ph.D. thesis is titled Feminist political action: the case of the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp which she completed in 1994. Roseneil undertook postgraduate training in Group Analysis at the Turvey Institute for Group Analy...

#255

Delphine Gardey

Delphine Gardey

#53476

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Delphine Gardey is a French historian and sociologist. She is a professor of contemporary history at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, and director of the Institute of Gender Studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences. She is currently a member of the editorial board of the journal Travail, Genre et Sociétés. She is also affiliated with "Groupement De Recherche Européen" and "Marché du travail et genre en Europe" . She is a member of the "Genre, Travail, Mobilités" Laboratory of "Centre de recherches sociologiques et politiques de Paris" . Her work focuses mainly on the history of s...

#256

Dale Spender

#8547

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Dale Spender was an Australian feminist scholar, teacher, writer and consultant. In 1983, Dale Spender was co-founder of and editorial advisor to Pandora Press, the first of the feminist imprints devoted solely to non-fiction, committed, according to The New York Times, to showing that "women were the mothers of the novel and that any other version of its origin is but a myth of male creation". She was the series editor of Penguin's Australian Women's Library from 1987. Spender's work is "a major contribution to the recovery of women writers and theorists and to the documentation of the cont...

#257

Mary Daly

#88878

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Mary Daly, is an Irish sociologist and academic. Since 2012, she has been Professor of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford. She previously researched and/or taught at the University of Limerick, the Institute of Public Administration, University College Dublin, the European University Institute, the Institute of Social Policy, University of Göttingen, and at Queen's University Belfast.

#258

Ashley Mears

#36619

Overall Influence

Ashley Mears is an American writer, sociologist, and former fashion model. She is currently a professor of sociology at Boston University. Mears is the author of Pricing Beauty: The Making of a Fashion Model and Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit, and is regularly quoted in media as an academic expert in the culture and economics of fashion.

#259

Jacquelyn Grant

#30417

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Jacquelyn Grant is an American theologian, a Methodist minister. Alongside Katie Cannon, Delores S. Williams, and Kelly Brown Douglas, Grant is considered one of the four founders of womanist theology. Womanist theology addresses theology from the viewpoint of Black women, reflecting on both their perspectives and experience in regards to faith and moral standards. Grant is currently the Callaway Professor of Systematic Theology at the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta.

#260

Barbara Reskin

#87060

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Barbara Reskin is a professor of sociology. As the S. Frank Miyamoto Professor of Sociology at the University of Washington, Reskin studies labor market stratification, examining job queues, nonstandard work, sex segregation, and affirmative action policies in employment and university admissions, mechanisms of work-place discrimination, and the role of credit markets in income poverty and inequality.

#261

Philomena Essed

Philomena Essed

#54693

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

Philomena Johanna Maria Essed is a professor of Critical Race, Gender and Leadership Studies at Antioch University Yellow Springs, Ohio. Biography Essed's parents are Surinamese. Her father Max Essed was a pediatrician. She grew up in Suriname and the Netherlands. From the age of fifteen she lived in Nijmegen, until moving in 1974 to Amsterdam.

#262

Åsa Wettergren

#63245

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (55 years)

Åsa Wettergren is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Gothenburg. Her research interests include social movements, migration, processes of identification and change in organization and society, and the sociology of emotions.

#263

Paula-Irene Villa Braslavsky

#100305

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (56 years)

Paula-Irene Villa Braslavsky is a German-Argentine sociologist. She is a professor of general sociology and gender studies at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and president of the German Sociological Association.

#264

Daria Khaltourina

Daria Khaltourina

#29023

Overall Influence

1979 - Present (45 years)

Daria Andreyevna Khaltourina is a Russian sociologist, anthropologist, demographer, and a public figure. She is the head of the Group of the Monitoring of Global and Regional Risks of the Russian Academy of Sciences, co-chairperson of the Russian Coalition for Alcohol Control, as well as the Russian Coalition for Tobacco Control. She is a laureate of the Russian Science Support Foundation Award in "The Best Economists of the Russian Academy of Sciences" nomination .

#265

Linda M. Williams

#48761

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Linda Meyer Williams is an American sociologist and criminologist. She is senior research scientist at Wellesley Centers for Women and director of the Justice and Gender-Based Violence Research Initiative. She is also professor emerita of criminal justice and criminology at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, where she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on child maltreatment, research methods, and gender, race and crime. Williams has researched in the field of psychology on topics including child abuse, family violence and violence against women, and trauma and memory .

#266

Mary Pattillo

#55682

Overall Influence

Mary Pattillo is Harold Washington Professor of Sociology and African American Studies at Northwestern University. As of 2016, she has served as director of undergraduate studies in African American studies and has been a faculty associate in Northwestern's Institute for Policy Research since 2004. She has formerly served as chair of Northwestern University's department of sociology.

#267

Maxine Baca Zinn

#65232

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Maxine Baca Zinn , née Baca, is an American sociologist known for her work on gender, race, and ethnicity and particularly, the experience of women of color at the intersection of race, class, and gender.

#268

Sally Macintyre

Sally Macintyre

#50481

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Dame Sarah Jane Macintyre , known as Sally Macintyre, is a British medical sociologist. She is a professor emerita at the University of Glasgow. In 1998 she was awarded an OBE for services to medical sociology, and in 2006 she was awarded a CBE for services to social science. In 2011 she was awarded a DBE for services to science. In 2013 she was one of 12 women to receive the inaugural 'Engineering and Physical Sciences' Suffrage Science award.

#269

Kalwant Bhopal

#62277

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Kalwant Bhopal is Professor of Education and Social Justice and Director of the Centre for Research in Race & Education at the University of Birmingham. Her work explores the achievements and experiences of minority ethnic groups in education with a focus on how processes of racism, exclusion and marginalisation operate in predominantly White spaces.

#270

Kari Norgaard

#25989

Overall Influence

Kari Marie Norgaard is a Professor of sociology at the University of Oregon, a post she has held since 2017. She is known for her research into Indigenous environmental justice, climate change denial and the politics of global warming.

#271

Cynthia Cockburn

Cynthia Cockburn

#86735

Overall Influence

1934 - 2019 (85 years)

Cynthia Cockburn was a British academic, feminist, and peace activist. Career Cockburn was a researcher in the fields of gender, war and peace-making, labour processes and trade unionism, and refugees. She was active in the international women's peace movement.

#272

Gurminder K. Bhambra

#84792

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Gurminder K. Bhambra is a British sociologist, theorist, and public intellectual specialising in postcolonial and global historical sociology. Her current work focuses on epistemological justice and reparations. While her research primarily focuses on global historical sociology, she is also interested in the intersection of the social sciences.

#273

Dorothy Nelkin

#53449

Overall Influence

1933 - 2003 (70 years)

Dorothy Wolfers Nelkin was an American sociologist of science most noted for her work researching and chronicling interplay between science, technology and the general public. Her work often highlighted the ramifications of unchecked scientific advances and potential threats to privacy and civil liberties. She was the author or co-author of 26 books, including Selling Science: How the Press Covers Science and Technology, The Molecular Gaze: Art in the Genetic Age, and Body Bazaar: The Market for Human Tissue in the Biotechnology Age.

#274

Ngai-Ling Sum

#49357

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Ngai-Ling Sum is a British sociologist and political economist and co-director of the Cultural Political Economy Research Centre at Lancaster University. Career Her 2006 book Beyond the Regulation Approach. Putting Capitalist Economies in their Place was awarded the Gunnar Myrdal Prize awarded given by the European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy. Geografiska Annaler called the book a good introduction to the theory of Regulation Approach. Sum's contributions to the book were considered "central in pushing its boundaries to the emerging project of cultural political economy" b...

#275

Nikki Giovanni

#2004

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Yolande Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni Jr. is an American poet, writer, commentator, activist, and educator. One of the world's most well-known African-American poets, her work includes poetry anthologies, poetry recordings, and nonfiction essays, and covers topics ranging from race and social issues to children's literature. She has won numerous awards, including the Langston Hughes Medal and the NAACP Image Award. She has been nominated for a Grammy Award for her poetry album, The Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection. Additionally, she has been named as one of Oprah Winfrey's 25 "Living Legends".

#276

Karen Cook

#85649

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Karen Schweers Cook is an American sociologist and the Ray Lyman Wilbur Professor of Sociology at Stanford University. In 2004 Cook received the Cooley-Mead Award for Distinguished Scholarship from the American Sociological Association. In 2007 Cook was elected as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for her work on social exchange theory, social networks and trust.

#277

Aihwa Ong

#24022

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Aihwa Ong is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, a member of the Science Council of the International Panel on Social Progress, and a former recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship for the study of sovereignty and citizenship. She is well known for her interdisciplinary approach in investigations of globalization, modernity, and citizenship from Southeast Asia and China to the Pacific Northwest of the United States. Her notions of 'flexible citizenship', 'graduated sovereignty,' and 'global assemblages' have widely impacted conceptions of the global in modernity across the social sciences and humanities.

#278

Maureen T. Hallinan

#73140

Overall Influence

1940 - 2014 (74 years)

Maureen T. Hallinan was an American sociologist and the William P. and Hazel B. White Professor of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame. She conducted research on the sociology of education, and she was the founding director of the Center for Research on Educational Opportunity in the Institute for Educational Initiatives. In 1996, she served as president of the American Sociological Association.

#279

Suzanne M. Bianchi

#88765

Overall Influence

1952 - 2013 (61 years)

Suzanne M. Bianchi was an American sociologist. She was known for her work studying the evolving American family and gender roles. Personal life Suzanne M. Bianchi was born in Fort Dodge, Iowa to Rita and Pesho Bianchi. Her mother was a housewife and her father was a meat packing plant employee. Bianchi was the oldest of six children. She and her husband, Mark Browning, had three children.

#280

Barbara Risman

#96506

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

Barbara Risman is Professor and Head of Sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Early life and education Barbara J. Risman was born on 20 July 1956 in Lynn, Massachusetts to an immigrant Jewish family. Risman's grandparents fled antisemitism in Europe and immigrated to the United States in the early 20th century. She grew up in a multi-generational extended family home with grandparents, aunts, and cousins as well as her parents and three siblings. An early experience of sexual discrimination occurred at her bat mitzvah in 1968. At that time, only boys were permitted to read from the Torah.

#281

Shahrzad Mojab

#39253

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Shahrzad Mojab is an academic activist and professor, teaching at the Department of Leadership, Higher and Adult Education and Women and Gender Studies Institute, at the University of Toronto. Shahrzad has been living in Canada since 1986 with her lifelong partner, colleague and comrade, Amir Hassanpour, and their son, Salah.

#282

Cherryl Walker

#60847

Overall Influence

Cherryl Walker is professor of sociology in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Stellenbosch University, which she joined in 2005, and is DSI/NRF SARChI Chair in the Sociology of Land, Environment and Sustainable Development at Stellenbosch since 2016. She is an authority on South African society - specialising in South Africa's land redistribution/restitution, land reform, gender and cosmopolitanism, and environmental sociology.

#284

Jill Manthorpe

#111258

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (69 years)

#285

Judith Shuval

#79898

Overall Influence

1926 - Present (98 years)

Judith Shuval is an Israeli professor emerita of sociology who taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, specializing in public health and immigration. Biography Judith Tannenbaum Shuval was born in 1926 in New York City. She attended Hunter College and later earned a bachelor's degree from the Jewish Theological Seminary. In 1949, she immigrated to Israel and worked at the Israel Institute of Applied Social Research. She completed her Ph.D. in sociology from Radcliffe College at Harvard University in 1955. That same year, she was appointed an adviser on immigrant absorption for UNESCO.

#286

Kari Wærness

#85394

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (85 years)

Kari Wærness is a Norwegian sociologist. Her research has focused on women and gender studies, family and caring. Early and personal life Wærness was born on 13 January 1939 in Leknes to Einar Loe and Aslaug Marie Eidsvåg. She married physician Endre Wærness in 1962.

#287

Ann-Dorte Christensen

#39351

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Ann-Dorte Christensen is a Danish professor at the Department of Sociology and Social Work at Aalborg University. Education In 1982 Christensen graduated as Master of Philosophy in social science at Aalborg University. Subsequently, Christensen worked as a postgraduate fellow on the project "The new social movements of the 60s and 70s" at the Department of Education and Socialization at Aalborg University.

#288

Anna Leander

#37128

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Anna Leander is a sociologist and political scientist. Leander is currently a professor at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. She previously taught at the Copenhagen Business School and the Inst. de Relacoes Internacionais, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro. Leander is well known for her work in critical security studies and international political sociology. Theoretically, Leander has played an important role in bringing the work of Pierre Bourdieu into conversation with the discipline of International Relations, as well as more recently working with materialist and pragmatist sociologies.

#289

Mabel Berezin

#103584

Overall Influence

Mabel Berezin is an American sociologist and a professor in the Department of Sociology at Cornell University. Education and career Berezin earned a Ph.D. in sociology at Harvard University in 1987. She worked at Harvard as a lecturer from 1987 to 1989, as an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania from 1989 to 1996, and as a visiting associate professor at the University of California, Los Angeles from 1996 to 2001. She joined the Cornell University faculty in 2002, and chaired the sociology department there from 2010 to 2014.

#290

Danielle Bleitrach

#31847

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Danielle Bleitrach is a French sociologist and journalist. From the 1970s through the end of the century, she was CNRS researcher and lecturer at the Aix-Marseille University, focusing on the sociology of the working class and urbanization. From 1981 to 1996 she was a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of France, then the National Committee of the Party. She was also assistant editor-in-chief of the party weekly Révolution. She has contributed to La Pensée, Les Temps Modernes and Le Monde Diplomatique. In the 2000s and 2010s, after retiring from teaching, she co-authored t...

#291

Paula England

#92975

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Paula S. England , is an American sociologist and Dean of Social Science at New York University Abu Dhabi. Her research has focused on gender inequality in the labor market, the family, and sexuality. She has also studied class differences in contraception and nonmarital births.

#292

Evelyn M. Kitagawa

#49353

Overall Influence

1920 - 2007 (87 years)

Evelyn Mae Kitagawa was an American sociologist and demographer who worked as a professor at the University of Chicago and became president of the Population Association of America and chair of the U.S. Census Bureau's Advisory Committee on Population Statistics. She is known for her book with Philip Hauser, Differential Mortality in the United States: A Study in Socioeconomic Epidemiology, which discovered systematic correlations between the death rates of Americans and their income and level of education. Kitagawa wrote the first paper on decomposing statistics into components associated with the joint movement of the levels and returns to predictors.

#293

Miriam M. Johnson

#55417

Overall Influence

1928 - 2007 (79 years)

Miriam M. Johnson was an American sociologist and professor emerita of the University of Oregon's Sociology Department. Life Miriam Johnson was born Miriam Massey in Atlanta, Georgia, on January 12, 1928, to Leola and Herbert Massey. While attending the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, she met Benton Johnson. They were married in 1951. In 1955 they had a son , followed by a daughter in 1957. Johnson died on November 21, 2007, in Eugene, Oregon, at the age of 79 of lung cancer after a short illness.

#294

Jill Quadagno

#77898

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Jill S. Quadagno is Professor of Sociology at Florida State University where she holds the Mildred and Claude Pepper Eminent Scholar Chair in Social Gerontology. She has been a recipient of a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the National Science Foundation, a National Science Foundation Visiting Professorship for Women, the Distinguished Scholar Award of the ASA Section on Aging, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, and an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship. In 1994 she served as Senior Policy Advisor on the President's Bipartisan Commission on Entitlement and Tax Reform, and in 1998 she served as president of the American Sociological Association.

#295

Regina Becker-Schmidt

#79169

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (87 years)

Regina Becker-Schmidt is an emeritus professor at the Institute of Sociology and Social Psychology at the Leibniz University Hannover. Her research focuses on corporate and subject theory, critical theory, psychoanalytically oriented social psychology and gender studies. She is considered a seminal figure in feminist critical theory.

#296

Barbara Adam

#101773

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Barbara E. Adam, , FLSW is a retired British sociologist and academic. She specialises in social theory particularity in reference to time. From 1988 to her retirement in 2011, she lectured at Cardiff University; she was appointed Professor of Sociology in 1999. She was the founding editor of the academic journal Time & Society.

#297

Christine Musselin

#83525

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

Christine Musselin is French sociologist specializing in the sociology of organizations. From 2002 to 2010 she was the director of the Center for the Sociology of Organizations . From 2011 to 2018 Musselin headed the research department of Sciences Po Paris.

#298

Elena Esposito

#45409

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (64 years)

Elena Esposito is an Italian sociologist who works in the field of social systems theory. She teaches general sociology at Bielefeld University and prediction and the future of public policy at the University of Bologna . Her research is embedded in Luhmannian social systems theory.

#299

Jenny Kitzinger

#114249

Overall Influence

#300

Svetlana Tatunts

#77831

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Svetlana A. Tatunts, - Armenian born Russian researcher of sociology, ethnicity, ethnic and national conflicts. Full professor at the Department of World Politics of Moscow State University named after Lomonosov .

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