Research Interests:  identity, inclusion, psychological safety, organizational culture, cultural capital, occupational segregation

Tiffany Smith is a doctoral student in the Organizational Behavior program jointly offered by Harvard Business School and the Department of Sociology at Harvard University. She received her B.S. in Economics from The Wharton School, where she concentrated in Marketing. After graduation, Tiffany worked as a Research Assistant at The Wharton School, where she gained extensive research experience by working on projects regarding identity, diversity, and inclusion both from a quantitative and qualitative perspective. As a full-time employee at a workforce development program for Philadelphia residents, she taught a course on social identity and diversity in organizations, where she discussed the definitions of diversity, equity, and inclusion, how organizations have addressed these issues over time, and how expectations of professionalism compare to the participants’ own cultural norms.

At Harvard, she intends to explore how the bias of professionalism standards influence organizational behavior both on a micro and macro level. On the micro level, she is interested in examining how individuals define and perceive professionalism standards in diverse workplaces and how their understandings impact their professional identity construction, experiences, and interactions in the workplace. On the macro level, she plans to investigate the history of professional standards in corporate environments and how the professional socialization experiences of diverse candidates influence their retention rates. Through these research interests, Tiffany aims to contribute to the diversity literature by investigating how current professional cultures and norms may advance discrimination in the workplace and endorse occupational segregation.

Tiffany is also working on a documentary project that explores the code-switching experiences of Black women.

Previous Degrees:
BS in Economics, The Wharton School, 2017
MA in Liberal Arts, University of Pennsylvania, 2021