Marianne Cooper is a sociologist at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research and the Center for the Advancement of Women’s Leadership at Stanford University. She is also an affiliate at the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality. She was the lead researcher for Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead by Sheryl Sandberg. She is a contributor to LeanIn.org, a contributing writer to the Atlantic, and a LinkedIn influencer. She is an author of the 2016 and 2017 Lean In & McKinsey Women in the Workplace reports on the status of women in corporate America. She is an expert on gender, women’s leadership, diversity and inclusion, financial insecurity, and economic inequality. At the Clayman Institute, she is a core team member of the Institute’s Voice & Influence program, which empowers men and women to excel professionally and provides them with the knowledge and tools to create organizations where all employees thrive. At the Center for the Advancement of Women’s Leadership, housed at the Clayman Institute, she is involved in conducting research and designing tools and solutions to increase the number of women leaders in education, industry, and government.
Marianne speaks regularly and consults with companies on a range of diversity, inclusion, and equity topics such as unconscious bias, empowering women leaders, recruiting, retaining, and advancing diverse employees, women’s rising economic power, and growing economic inequality. She has worked with companies such as Kraft, Bank of America, Amazon, and Adobe, and non-profits such as HeForShe, Professional Business Women of California, and the League of Women in Government.
Her recent book, Cut Adrift: Families in Insecure Times, examines how families are coping in an insecure age. She received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley. She is a Bay Area native and lives in Silicon Valley with her husband and two children.