Sharla Alegria

Sharla Alegria is assistant professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto. She studies race and gender based inequality in workplaces that embrace diversity.

Sharla Alegria joined the University of Toronto as an assistant professor of Sociology in 2019. She earned her Ph.D. in Sociology with a certificate in Women, Gender, and Sexuality studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2016. She teaches classes on work; race, class, and gender; science, knowledge, and technology; stratification and inequality.

Two broad goals drive her research agenda: (1) to understand how inequalities persist when individuals and institutions publicly reject discrimination and (2) to understand the equity related consequences of the shift toward flexible workplace practices, especially in knowledge-based, globally interconnected work.

Sharla’s research on inequality in new economy, knowledge-based work examines tech work to understand why women’s representation in computing jobs has decreased since the early 1990s despite public and private sector investment. She shows that corporate innovations reshaping the structure of workplaces (e.g., increasing contract labor and globally distributing work) create distinctly 21st century obstacles for workers with outsized consequences for women and immigrant workers.

Her current projects include examining the career impact and potential for improving equity outcomes of short-cycle tech training programs, a study of the different ways that inequality operates in US federal agencies, and a survey to understand Open Source Software developer's experiences with joining and participating in OSS communities.