Women of Influence

Katelyn Cranney is majoring in math and economics, and minoring in international development and statistics. If double majors and minors don’t prove her love of learning, Katelyn is also a full-time research assistant for professors at BYU and Harvard Business School. Hailing from the Denver, Colorado area, Katelyn is a fan of the outdoors: paddleboarding, hiking, and trail running are just a few of her hobbies. Lately, though, Katelyn has been doubling down on economics research. She is preparing her Honors thesis.

Katelyn’s thesis is about the influence that women have in groups of both men and women. Do group members perceive women as more or less influential than their male team members? The data was collected from groups of students interacting in groups in a classroom study. With permission, Katelyn’s team recorded hundreds of minutes of conversations and conducted surveys with the students.

Since influence is a broad term, Katelyn first had to come up with a way to measure it. "To simplify it, if you're in a group of six people, then you should get one sixth of the influence of that group—that much sway over the group's decisions and that much of the talking time,” she said. “And we see that women are in the minority. They're getting much, much less than that one sixth that they should fairly be getting.”

Katelyn has been working on this project for several years; in fact, her team has already published a paper on the research. However, the team’s original conclusion led to more questions: "Now we're kind of taking a different angle: we [discovered] that there are these trends of discriminatory behavior against women in the minority of their groups. So, what's driving that?” To explore, Katelyn is examining the data from the conversations among group members.

A surprising turn of events was that, according to Katelyn’s most recent analysis, women and men actually speak the same amount in group conversations. This leads to even more questions for Katelyn. “It looks like women's conversations aren't translated to influence the way that men's are.” This is a surprising result, because “one [common] idea is that if women talk more and contribute more to their groups, they'll be seen as more influential. The first waves of [analysis] aren't showing that that's true.”

However, Katelyn is careful not to draw premature conclusions. She continued, “The data is very messy and hard to look at, so that might not be true in every case. It’s also over time. Still, that’s one result that we've gotten that I'm like, ‘huh, there's more to learn with it.’”

Each question in Katelyn’s study has opened new areas of exploration. “Right now, I'm looking at data on the tones of the groups—things like disgust and anger—using machine learning algorithms,” she said. “Do the more male-centered groups maybe have a harsher tone, and does that relate to influence? We’re asking questions like that.”

Katelyn’s questions are also directed by the skills and information she learns along the way. “I took a machine learning class a while ago, and without that class, I wouldn't able to answer some of the questions that I'm currently looking at for my thesis,” she said. “The more I learn, the better I get at asking questions and seeing things in more nuanced ways.

Working through a thesis is difficult, but Katelyn’s educational journey has been defined by learning she can do hard things. “The idea of self-efficacy, which is the idea of ‘I can do things that are hard,’ is something that's vastly misunderstood—it’s a really powerful tool. I don't know how to code in Python, but I'm going to figure out how to do it so I can do this project. If you can learn self-efficacy, the world's your oyster. You can do anything you want to do.” Rather than worrying about choosing the perfect major, she encouraged students to develop self-efficacy. Armed with this mindset, students can take any number of paths to eventually end up where they’re meant to be.

Katelyn also had some advice for Honors students preparing to work on their thesis. As an economics major, her field has different research parameters than some others. “Economics papers in particular are normally—at minimum—a five-year process,” Katelyn said—and she’s already been working on it for over three years. It’s impossible to squeeze a meaningful economics research project into the timeframe of an Honors thesis. So, what’s the best practice?

“Sometimes there are questions that you want to answer that don't fit within one class, or one 10-hour project, or one essay…and that's okay,” was Katelyn’s answer. “If all questions had to be constrained into a time budget, then it wouldn't be as interesting. Let yourself be a little bit free of some of those. I’ll still keep working on [my thesis research] even after I submit it for Honors, because I'm still answering this question. I think that will also just make better work.”

Katelyn is excited to submit the next chapter of her research for the Honors thesis. Then, she plans to continue her work and offer something valuable to the field of economics. She is currently applying for economics PhD programs for next year. In the true Honors spirit, Katelyn is using her skills of inquiry and self-efficacy to make an impact.