Cornell University · ILR School
Katie Apker
I study how new digital technologies reshape work, entrepreneurship & social inequality.
I am on the 2026-2027 management academic job market.
Cornell University · ILR School
I study how new digital technologies reshape work, entrepreneurship & social inequality.
I am on the 2026-2027 management academic job market.
I am a PhD candidate in Organizational Behavior at Cornell University. My research examines the social dynamics of entrepreneurship, work, and inequality, with a focus on how digital platforms and emerging technologies reshape who gets opportunities, visibility, and rewards.
My primary research stream focuses on new forms of digital entrepreneurship such as content creation and social media influencing. Using organizational theory and sociological perspectives, I explore how digital platforms, algorithms, and social media create new opportunities and constraints for founders, and the implications for inequality, innovation, and the future of work.
Specifically, my research investigates:
My work is relevant to scholars interested in the social dimensions of entrepreneurship, technology, innovation, labor markets, and organizational theory. I employ econometric methods, including difference-in-differences designs, alongside qualitative research methods.
Prior to academia, I founded and exited a digital marketing asset company and earned an MBA from Brigham Young University. I have taught courses on the Sociology and Psychology of Work at Cornell and MBA business courses at BYU.
Can negative evaluations help entrepreneurs? Scholarship often expects attention to follow favorable evaluation, yet on platforms run by engagement-optimizing algorithms, visibility often flows to negative, high-arousal reactions instead. My job market paper asks how audience evaluation relates to entrepreneurial visibility in these algorithmically mediated attention markets, and whether the dynamics are gendered. I analyze a random sample of 9,232 U.S. YouTube creators and more than 5.7 million audience comments. Women's channels receive about 33% fewer views in the raw data; about a third of that gap reflects production differences, including younger channels and fewer videos, and the remaining controlled gap is about 22%.
I find what I term a negative arousal bonus: negative, profane comment sections predict more views, while positive comment tone predicts fewer, both across channels and within a creator's own channel. Topics, titles, transcripts, and thumbnails barely move the remaining gap: no single creator-controlled surface explains more than about 9%, and some run in women's favor. Instead, women's comment sections are more positive and less profane, and that softer reception accounts for most of the controlled view gap. Gentler treatment, while ostensibly positive, carries less of the high-arousal signal that audience resharing and recommendation systems amplify into views.
Papers listed by stage. The descriptions below state each project's question and current finding in plain language.
How digital entrepreneurs' individualist or collective founder identity shapes the opportunities they pursue online, and how that identity is gendered.
On YouTube, visibility follows a negative arousal bonus: negative, profane audience engagement predicts more views, and positive tone predicts fewer. Women's channels receive warmer, less profane comments, and that softer reception accounts for most of their controlled view gap.
A framework for management researchers studying the creator economy: what defines the field, why it matters, and which questions remain open.
Whether corporate social responsibility ratings push all boards, or just some boards, toward adding more women.
How managers' political views shape their expectations about enforcement and their compliance with government mandates.
A panel following YouTube creators over time as AI tools enter their work, with attention to career effects for women and men.
How the link between workforce diversity and organizational outcomes has changed across decades.
Whether one spouse's long work hours change the other spouse's likelihood of starting a business, and how that pattern differs by gender.
My work connects digital platforms, entrepreneurship, and gender. Each theme below links to the papers behind it. Prefer the list? Jump to all research.
I am a PhD candidate in Organizational Behavior at Cornell University's ILR School, where my dissertation is chaired by Pamela Tolbert, with Ben Rissing and Wesley Sine on the committee. I study digital entrepreneurship, creators, and platform-based work, with gender as the empirical lens.
The dissertation runs across three chapters. The first, my job market paper, shows how platform algorithms shape gendered evaluation and visibility, so that women's channels can draw warmer reception yet less of the amplification that turns into views. The second is an interview study of digital-era founders, built from 61 qualitative interviews, that identifies an Individualist founder type who organizes the venture around an idealized self rather than an external market opportunity. The third is a conceptual chapter that frames content creation in the creator economy as a distinct new form of digital venture creation.
I combine econometric methods, including difference-in-differences designs, mediation, and sensitivity analysis on large original datasets, with qualitative interviewing. Before academia I founded, operated, and sold a digital marketing asset company, and I earned an MBA from Brigham Young University. At Cornell's ILR School I designed and taught my own weekly discussion sections for "Psychology of Work" and "Sociology of Work," and I have assisted with MBA and Executive MBA courses at Cornell's Johnson School of Business and BYU's Marriott School of Business.