“As you know, we have traditionally invited the nation’s leading scholars to reflect on Dr. King’s social justice legacy in contemporary times,” Dr. Will Ross of Washington University School of Medicine said of the school’s annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Lecture. “This year our ‘leading scholar’ is right here in our midst.”
Adia Harvey Wingfield – the Mary Tileston Hemenway Professor of Arts & Sciences and associate dean for Faculty Development at Washington University in St. Louis – will present the School of Medicine’s 2020 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Lecture at 4 p.m. Monday, January 20 at the Eric P. Newman Education Center, 320 South Euclid Ave.
“Professor Adia Wingfield has emerged as one of the preeminent social scientists in the country. Her research interests are in the persistence of intersectional racial and gender inequalities in professional occupations, in particular the challenges facing African-American men in workplaces where they are in the minority,” said Dr. Ross, who is associate dean for Diversity, principal Officer for Community Partnerships and a professor of Medicine, Division of Nephrology, at the school.
“She is the author of several books, most recently the award-winning ‘No More Invisible Man: Race and Gender in Men’s Work,’ and is a contributing writer for The Atlantic. We had the honor of recruiting her to Washington University to reestablish our Sociology Department in 2015. Our community will be riveted by what she has to say on achieving equity in a polarized society.”
Wingfield has studied black professionals working as lawyers, doctors, engineers, and nurses. Her research challenges many sociological assumptions about workplace inequality: the idea that men advance in occupations dominated by women, that tokenism alienates members of minority groups from each other, and that black professionals are quick to attribute occupational challenges to their minority status rather than other factors.
Her article “Racializing the Glass Escalator,” published in 2009 in Gender & Society, won the Distinguished Article Award from the Race, Gender, and Class section of the American Sociological Association. She later won the Distinguished Book Award from this same section for her book “No More Invisible Man,” a study of black professional men in culturally masculinized occupations. That book also won the Richard A. Lester Award from the Industrial Relations section of Princeton University. Wingfield is the recipient of the 2018 Public Understanding of Sociology award from the American Sociological Association.
In addition to her academic scholarship, she has written for mainstream outlets other than The Atlantic, including Slate, Harvard Business Review, and Vox.
Last year, Vox asked her and 14 other experts, “What do we do think now that will be considered unthinkable in 50 years?” and she responded with an essay titled, “Abandoning public education will be considered unthinkable 50 years from now.”
“Today, proponents of our current educational system of unfettered school choice argue that diverting local, state, and federal funding to these varied types of schools creates necessary options and gives parents more control over their children’s education,” she wrote.
“But this narrow, individualized focus maintains the racial and economic disparities that desegregation was supposed to eradicate. School is viewed less as a public good and more and more as something we buy access to, and thus driven by income and wealth.”
Washington University recruited her from Georgia State University, where she had tenure, in 2015 as one of three professors who reestablished its sociology department. Previously she was a visiting professor of sociology at Rikkyo University in Tokyo, Japan and an assistant professor of sociology at Hollins University. She attended Spelman College as an undergraduate, studying English, then received her M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology from Johns Hopkins University.
