Eunmi Mun is an Associate Professor in the School of Labor and Employment Relations at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her research tries to answer why gender inequality in the workplace persists and what can be done to reduce it. She is most interested in understanding how public policies to reduce gender inequality are implemented at the workplace level, as well as their impact on the gender pay and promotion gaps. She is currently working on a comparative project to examine the implementation of parental leave policies across different policy contexts.
She has also investigated the local interpretation of global pressures. Specifically, she examines how large Japanese firms respond to the global norm of corporate social responsibility and the rising pressure to adopt practices from liberal market economies, and whether and to what extent they modify traditional Japanese corporate governance and employment practices. Finally, she has been actively participating in international collaboration with scholars from different countries. In particular, she is part of Comparative Organizational and Institutional Network (COIN), which is composed of scholars from 15 countries, who analyze the patterns of inequality using employer-employee linked data. COIN’s on-going projects examine cross-national variation in gender wage gap and the growing segregation between top earners and bottom earners at workplaces.
She received her BA in sociology from Seoul National University, South Korea, and her PhD in sociology from Harvard University.