B.A., Indiana University-Bloomington; M.A., UNC Chapel Hill; Ph.D. Candidate, UNC-Chapel Hill. Areas of specialization: Gender; Sexuality; Work and Organizations; Theory; Methods.That’s what Assistant Professor Kathryn Schmidt’s short bio says. However, if there’s one thing I can say after my brief interview with Guilford’s new sociology faculty member, it’s that she can’t be compressed into 24 words.

I quickly found out that she is friendly and that talking to her was Will Groves

Staff Writer

B.A., Indiana University-Bloomington; M.A., UNC Chapel Hill; Ph.D. Candidate, UNC-Chapel Hill. Areas of specialization: Gender; Sexuality; Work and Organizations; Theory; Methods.

That’s what Assistant Professor Kathryn Schmidt’s short bio says. However, if there’s one thing I can say after my brief interview with Guilford’s new sociology faculty member, it’s that she can’t be compressed into 24 words.

I quickly found out that she is friendly and that talking to her was easy. We discussed many things other than my profile story about her before, during, and after the interview, and she was not only well-spoken, she also listened attentively and was very responsive to what I, a student she had met five minutes earlier, had to say.

Schmidt is currently finishing her doctoral dissertation at UNC-Chapel Hill on how lesbian workers manage their sexual identity at the workplace or, to put it another way, “How do we mix who we are with the kind of work we do?”

“Unless we account for sexuality, we assume all workers are married men, and we treat them as such,” says Schmidt.

According to Schmidt, work and organizations is a big subset of sociology which she was first attracted to in high school on a trip to Japan. There she saw how differently Japanese society is organized, especially in terms of work and management styles.

In college, Schmidt began by majoring in international business but switched to sociology instead. She wanted to examine the business world in a more people-focused way. Rather than evaluating decisions in terms of what would be cheaper and more efficient, she wanted to examine how to make work advantageous for people. Schmidt says that the sociological approach fits her principles and way of looking at the world.

Guilford seems to fit her world-view, as well. Schmidt says she chose Guilford for quite a few reasons. “I really liked Guilford’s combined emphasis on research and community service. The job description said they were looking for a teacher, activist, and researcher. I was excited about all of those things,” said Schmidt.

Schmidt teaches five different classes at Guilford: Social Problems, Social Theory, Sociology of Sex and Gender, Research Methods, and Gender Violence.

As a lesbian, she was excited about Guilford’s principle of non-discrimination, and the Quaker principles of tolerance. “I like the Quaker beliefs,” said Schmidt. “[They teach] us to strive towards eliminating prejudice towards all people.”

The sociology and anthropology department appears to have a valuable asset in Kathryn Schmidt.