Cornell University · ILR School
Katie Apker
I study how new digital technologies reshape work, entrepreneurship & social inequality.
Cornell University · ILR School
I study how new digital technologies reshape work, entrepreneurship & social inequality.
I am a PhD candidate in Organizational Behavior at Cornell University studying 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:
Before pursuing my PhD, I founded, operated, and exited a digital marketing asset company and earned an MBA from Brigham Young University.
This paper examines how audience evaluation relates to entrepreneurial visibility on YouTube, focusing on gender differences. The analysis draws on 9,096 channels with comment data, selected at random from the Infludata frame of U.S. individual creators with at least 2,000 subscribers. Creator gender was hand-coded under written rules with high reliability (kappa = 0.96). The dataset integrates YouTube Data API metrics, over 5.7 million audience comments from more than 450,000 videos, and text- and image-based measures of creator content.
I find that women’s channels receive about 20 percent fewer views than men’s when comparing channels of the same age, video count, and content category. More positive comment tone is associated with fewer views, while more profane comments are associated with more views, both across creators and within individual creators’ videos; this association is what I term a “negative arousal bonus.” Women’s channels receive more positive comments and about 55 percent less profanity, a pattern consistent with benevolent sexism. In a Gelbach decomposition of the 20 percent gap, comment tone accounts for 88.0 percent and profanity for 6.7 percent; the two together account for 94.7 percent. Women’s own titles and descriptions are more positive, and holding them equal widens the gap. With tone and profanity held equal, the remaining difference in views is not statistically distinguishable from zero. These findings highlight that even ostensibly positive evaluation can reproduce gender inequality when resource allocation depends on the intensity rather than the favorability of evaluation, a dynamic especially relevant in algorithmically mediated settings.
How digital entrepreneurs' individualist or collective founder identity shapes the opportunities they pursue online, and how that identity is gendered.
How managers' political views shape their expectations about enforcement and their compliance with government mandates.
Women’s YouTube channels receive about 20 percent fewer views than men’s channels of the same age, video count, and content category. More positive comment tone is associated with fewer views and more profanity with more views. Women’s channels receive more positive and less profane comments, jointly accounting for the majority of the 20 percent 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.
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.
My job market paper finds that women’s YouTube channels receive about 20 percent fewer views than men’s channels of the same age, video count, and content category, with more positive and less profane audience comments accounting for most of this gap; women’s own titles and descriptions do not account for it, as holding them equal widens the gap. In a second study, I draw on 61 interviews with digital-era founders to identify a founder type I call the Individualist, who builds ventures centered on an idealized self rather than external market opportunities. Finally, my conceptual chapter frames content creation within the creator economy as a distinct new form of digital venture creation.
My dissertation is chaired by Pamela Tolbert, with Ben Rissing and Wesley Sine on the committee. I combine econometric methods, including difference-in-differences designs, mediation, and sensitivity analysis on large original datasets, with qualitative interviewing.