Jennifer Hickes Lundquist 
Professor of Sociology / Senior Associate Dean of Research & Faculty Development | University of Massachusetts Amherst
Amherst, MA, UNITED STATES
Jennifer Lundquist examines the pathways through which racial, ethnic and gender inequalities are perpetuated in institutional settings.
Expertise (4)
Workplace Inequality
Online Dating Behaviors
Race and Ethnicity
Inequality
Biography
Jennifer Lundquist examines the pathways through which racial, ethnic and gender inequalities are perpetuated and sometimes undone in various institutional settings, such as the workplace, the dating/marriage market and in families.
Her major areas of scholarship include analyzing online dating behaviors to better understand how interracial interaction contributes to continued racial hierarchies; taking advantage of unique social continuities in the U.S. military that provide insight into what drives racial disparities in health, family formation behaviors and other outcomes in larger society; and tracing the development and impact on the American welfare system of the U.S. prison and military system “submerged states.” By exploring alternative institutional contexts, she casts a number of important social problems in a new light. Her data collection and methods span from analysis of “big data” scraped from the web, administrative records and surveys to qualitative interview approaches.
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Education (3)
University of Pennsylvania: Joint Ph.D., Sociology & Demography
University of Pennsylvania: A.M., Demography
Washington and Lee University: B.A., Anthropology/Archaeology and Spanish
Links (2)
Media Coverage (5)
Beyond the Scenes from The Daily Show with Trevor Noah: How Sexual Racism Affects Online Dating
Comedy Central online
2022-05-31
In a podcast, Jennifer Lundquist discusses digital sexual racism with “The Daily Show with Trevor Noah” correspondent Ronny Chieng and comedian Roy Wood Jr.
People are using Tinder to sell insurance policies and looking for love on LinkedIn, in an online world where the boundaries are increasingly blurred
Insider online
2022-04-21
Jennifer Lundquist s quoted in a story about dating apps increasingly being used for purposes other than those intended, such as using LinkedIn to find a date or Tinder to sell insurance.
Why your swipes on Hinge and OKCupid might be racist
New York Post print
2021-02-19
Jennifer Lundquist is interviewed for an article about “The Dating Divide,” the new book she co-authored, which examines racism in the world of online dating.
This 24-year-old Boston student went on as many as three dates a day for a month — all in the name of love
The Boston Globe print
2018-09-08
Jennifer Lundquist comments in a story about a 24-year-old Boston man who has developed an approach to online dating that is based exclusively on efficiency and meeting as many women as possible each day. “I think people just have an internal abhorrence to approaching romance that way – it seems so assembly-line cold and clinical. And I think we should get over that. You shouldn’t be online dating if you’re not willing to be really analytical about it,” Lundquist says.
What Is the 'Success Sequence' and Why Do So Many Conservatives Like It?
The Atlantic print
2018-07-31
When Jennifer Lundquist. a sociologist at UMass Amherst, studied marriage in the U.S. military, she found that when the economic and social structures around people were stable and equal, differences in marriage rates largely disappeared. “Black civilians are less likely than white civilians to marry, whereas black and white military enlistees exhibit similar—and very high—propensities to marry,” she wrote.
Publications (3)
Why are so many big tech whistleblowers women? Here is what the research shows
The ConversationFrancine Berman and Jennifer Lundquist
2022-06-06
UMass Amherst faculty Francine Berman and Jennifer Lundquist examine the reasons that many whistleblowers in the technology industry tend to be women.
The Dating Divide: Race and Desire in the Era of Online Romance (BOOK)
University of California PressCeleste Vaughan Curington, Jennifer Hickes Lundquist and Ken-Hou Lin
2021-02-09
The Dating Divide is the first comprehensive look at "digital-sexual racism," a distinct form of racism that is mediated and amplified through the impersonal and anonymous context of online dating.
Does a Criminal Past Predict Worker Performance? Evidence from One of America's Largest Employers
Social ForcesJennifer Lundquist, Elko Strader and Devah Prager
2018-01-30
This paper is one of the first systematic assessments of ex-felons’ workplace performance. Using FOIA-requested data from the Department of Defense, we follow 1.3 million ex-offender and non-offender enlistees in the US military from 2002 to 2009. Those with a felony background show no difference in attrition rates due to poor performance compared to those without criminal records
