Jayanti Owens

Jayanti Owens is a Research Assistant Professor of Management and Organizations. Her research examines how organizations negotiate racial/ethnic and gender differences, with a particular focus on processes of evaluation and organizational sanctioning of deviant behavior. Using methods ranging from social experiments and text-as-data to interviews and analyses of large-scale surveys and administrative records, her work unpacks how evaluation practices can reproduce—or help reduce—racial/ethnic and gender inequality within and between organizations. In one stream of work, Jayanti examines the causes and consequences of social labels (“minority,” “deviant,” “disabled”) on individual organizational actors (e.g., students, employees) using cases ranging from racial/ethnic disparities in school discipline to the labeling and medicalization of individual behaviors through diagnoses of ADHD. In a second stream of research, she investigates how processes of evaluation can shape gender disparities in hiring and promotion in elite professional services firms.

Jayanti’s research has been funded by the William T. Grant Foundation Scholars Award (2020-2027), the Foundation for Child Development Young Scholars Award (2022-2027), the Spencer Foundation, the National Academy of Education, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Social Science Research Council, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, and the Institute for Clinical and Translational Research at the University of Wisconsin. Resulting work has been published in journals including the American Sociological Review, Sociology of Education, Social Forces, Journal of Health & Social Behavior, and Social Science & Medicine and has been covered by news outlets including The New York Times, National Public Radio (NPR), the British Broadcast Corporation (BBC), Forbes, US News & World Report, and The Telegraph. 

Prior to coming to Northwestern, Jayanti was an Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior and an affiliate of The Broad Center for Transformative Leadership in Public Education at the Yale School of Management (Yale University) and the Mary Tefft and John Hazen White, Sr. Assistant Professor of Sociology and International and Public Affairs at Brown University, where she earned tenure in 2022. From 2013 to 2015, she was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Jayanti earned her joint Ph.D. in Sociology and Demography at Princeton University. She has worked at organizations such as the Urban Institute, Mathematica Policy Research, and the U.S. House of Representatives.