M.A., Sociology, UC Santa Barbara
B.A., Anthropology & French, DePauw University, Indiana
Friendship, Culture, Gender, Sexuality, Qualitative and Quantitative Methods, Economic Sociology, Organizations & Work, Social Psychology
Emily Fox (she/her) is a PhD candidate in Sociology who employs qualitative and quantitative methods to examine how friendship shapes and is shaped by inequality. Her ethnographic dissertation examines the case of multi-level marketing, an industry that heavily relies on social connections and relationships, to advance relational approaches to markets and organizations by centering friendship. Her other work considers how understandings and experiences of friendship vary across gender, race, and sexuality. One article, published in Sociology Compass, offers a conceptual framework to synthesize friendship scholarship across disciplines and consider the co-constructive nature of gender, sexuality, and friendship. In “Are White Men Missing Out?: Differences in Friendship Closeness by Gender and Ethnoracial Identity” (Sex Roles), she uses nationally representative survey data to show that the widely accepted gender gap in friendship closeness can be largely attributed to the uniquely low levels of friendship closeness among white men. An on-going collaborative project uses original survey data to delineate the cultural construction of relationship categories and understand how U.S. adults differentiate platonic, romantic, and sexual attraction in their own lives. Respondents include substantial groups who identify as asexual and/or aromantic, enabling comparisons across sexual and romantic identities.
Publications:
Fox, Emily C. 2026. “Are White Men Missing Out?: Differences in Friendship Closeness by Gender and Ethnoracial Identity.” Sex Roles 92(2): article 12. doi: 10.1007/s11199-025-01638-7.
Fox, Emily C. 2024. “Toward a Sociological Perspective on the Gender and Sexuality of Friendship.” Sociology Compass 18(8):e13263. doi: 10.1111/soc4.13263.
Fox, Emily C. 2024. “Masculinities and Friendship.” Pp. 864-865 in The SAGE Encyclopedia of LGBTQ+ Studies, edited by A. E. Goldberg. 2nd edition. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE.
Fox, Emily, and Canton Winer. 2024. “What Is Friendship? Learning from Asexual and Aromantic Perspectives.” Pp. 293–294 in Families as They Really Are, edited by V. E. Rutter, K. Williams, and B. J. Risman. 3rd Edition. New York: Norton.
Fox, Emily C. 2023. “Book Review: Men’s Friendships as Feminist Politics?: Power, Intimacy, and Change.” Men and Masculinities 27(3):312-313. doi: 10.1177/1097184X231214320.
Courses:
As Instructor of Record:
- Sociology of Gender
- Social Inequalities
As Teaching Assistant:
- Intro to Sociology
- Quantitative Methods
- Experimental Methods & Design
- Studying People Firsthand (Interview & Observational Methods)
- Theories of Gender and Inequality
- Race, Gender, Class, Sexuality
- Sociology of Sexuality
- Urban Sexualities
- Sociology of Privilege
- Social Inequalities
- Issues in Social Psychology