Kim Weeden  Kim A. Weeden is an American sociologist. She is a professor of sociology at Cornell University, where she is also a Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow and the Jan Rock Zubrow '77 Professor of the Social Sciences. Weeden studies income inequality, the gender wage gap, and what determines the professions that different people enter and the academic majors that students select. She primarily uses large-scale surveys to study these topics. Weeden grew up in Alaska, and attended Willamette University, earning both a BA in sociology and a BS in psychology. She then received an MA in sociology from Stanford University in 1993, and a PhD in sociology there in 1999. After graduating with her PhD, Weeden joined the faculty of Sociology at the University of Chicago, where she was also affiliated with the Alfred P. Sloan Center on Parents, Children, and Work, as well as the Population Research Center. In 2001, she moved to Cornell University. Weeden was the Chair of the Department of Sociology at Cornell University from 2007 until 2010, and then began a second term as Chair in 2015. Beginning in 2013, she was the Director of the Center for the Study of Inequality at Cornell University. Since 2015, Weeden has been the Jan Rock Zubrow '77 Professor of sociology at Cornell. In 2019, Weeden was named a Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow, which is Cornell's highest honor for teaching. The primary focus of Weeden's work has been income inequality, with particular attention to the sources and consequences of the gender wage gap. Her findings are largely quantitative results that rely on large-scale national surveys. She has also studied the relationship between the income of a student's family and their choice of academic major. In 2002, Weeden published the article "Why do Some Occupations Pay More than Others? Social Closure and Earnings Inequality in the United States", in which she uses the neo-Weberian theory of closures (the sociological phenomenon in which groups maintain their resources by defining criteria by which to exclude others from the group) to explain the variation in wages for 488 occupations. The article won the 2004 Richard S. Scott Award for Distinguished Scholarship from the Organizations, Occupations, and Work section of the American Sociological Association. In a 2014 paper, "Overwork and the Slow Convergence in the Gender Gap in Earnings" in the "American Sociological Review", Weeden and Youngjoo Cha used data from the Current Population Survey between 1979 and 2009 to study why women's increasing participation and expertise in the labor market has not made more of an impact in decreasing the gender wage gap.