Joel Mittleman

Assistant Professor

Research Interests

Gender and Sexuality, LGBTQ+ Populations, Quantitative and Computational Methods, Stratification, Social Demography, Sociology of Education

Subfields

Gender and Family, Sociology of Education, Stratification and Inequality

Profile

Joel Mittleman is the William P. and Hazel B. White Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame, where he is also a faculty affiliate in the Gender Studies Program and the Center for Research on Educational Opportunity. For the 2023/24 academic year, he is a National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow.

Mittleman’s sole-authored research has been published in the American Sociological Review, Demography, Gender & Society, Sociology of Education, Socius, Journal of Adolescent Health and Educational Researcher. His study, “Intersecting the Academic Gender Gap: The Education of Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual America,” won outstanding article awards from the ASA’s Inequality, Poverty & Mobility and Sociology of Population sections as well as from the Sociology of Education Association.

Mittleman studies gender inequality in schools and society with a focus on LGBTQ+ populations. Incorporating insights from feminist and queer theory, his research applies quantitative and computational methods to large-scale, population-representative data. Across projects, he shows how LGBTQ+ populations encourage new ways of conceptualizing gender and new approaches to measuring the dynamics of gender inequality. As such, much of his research advances innovative methods for analyzing inequality beyond the binary categories of female and male.

Mittleman earned his PhD in Sociology and Social Policy at Princeton University, where he was a trainee in the Office of Population Research.