Profile
Margaret M. Chin is Professor of Sociology at CUNY Hunter College and the Graduate Center, and the author of three award winning books, Stuck: Why Asian Americans Don’t Reach the Top of the Corporate Ladder and Sewing Women: Immigrants and the New York City Garment Industry and The Peer Effect: How Your Peers Shape Who You Are and Who You Will Become written with Syed Ali.
Professor Chin was born and raised in New York City and is herself a child of working-class Chinese immigrant parents. Dr Chin received her BA from Harvard University and her PhD from Columbia University. She is a board member of the Tenement Museum and is a co-founder and board member of the Coalition for a Diverse Harvard. She believes in the importance of science and data, using both in narrative to explain our world.
Sewing Women: Immigrants and the New York City Garment Industry (Columbia University Press, 2005/15), an illuminating ethnography on the Chinese, Korean, Mexican and Ecuadorian garment workers, was honored by the Coalition for Labor Union Women (CLUW) and received an honorable mention from the Thomas and Znaniecki Book Award committee of the International Migration Section of the American Sociological Association.
Her second book, Stuck: Why Asian Americans Don't Reach the Top of the Corporate Ladder (NYU Press, 2020), an interview analysis of how factors such as race and trust can hold second generation Asian Americans back, was the winner for the Association of American Publishers 2021 PROSE (Professional and Scholarly Excellence) Book Award in the Business, Finance, and Management category.
The Peer Effect: How Your Peers Shape Who You Are and Who You Will Become was written with Syed Ali (NYU Press, 2023),. An analysis of the power of peers in shaping how we interact with the world, examining cases from Stuyvesant High School, to police departments to corporate America and even baseball teams.
Prof Chin’s honors include an American Sociological Association's Minority Fellows Award, a NSF Dissertation Grant, a Social Science Research Councils Postdoctoral Fellowship in International Migration, and a Woodrow Wilson Foundation Career Enhancement Fellowship. She was the vice president of the Eastern Sociological Society (2015-2016). She is affiliated with Hunter College's Asian American Center and the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute, CUNY's Asian/ Asian American Research Institute, and the Stanford VMware Women's Leadership Innovation Lab. Her work has been featured in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, USA Today, Marketwatch, and other news outlets.