Sofia Jaime
  • July 30, 2026

  • UC Irvine sociology graduate student Sofia Jaime earns accolades for work highlighting hidden inequality

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A desire to better understand society and address inequality in disadvantaged populations first led Sofia Jaime to sociology. Since then, the field has opened doors to an unexpectedly wide range of opportunities. The UC Irvine sociology graduate student has researched international development efforts in Africa, explored how artificial intelligence shapes government decision-making in Europe, developed methods for measuring occupational inequality and even contributed to work supporting Argentina's G20 summit.

“I was struck by how varied the tools in sociology can be,” she says. “This range is exactly what attracts me most: the wide variety of tasks a sociologist can be part of.”

She’s crossed continents, disciplines and languages on her pathway to a Ph.D., earning her undergraduate degree at the University of Buenos Aires before completing two master’s – one in international cooperation at Comillas Pontifical University of Madrid and another in social sciences at the Carlos III University of Madrid. Along the way, she’s taught courses in Argentina, Germany, Spain, the United States, and Italy, covering not only sociology but also research methodology and language courses in Spanish and English.

“Teaching in so many places, and in more than one discipline and language, taught me to explain the same idea in completely different ways depending on who is in the room,” she says. “Each classroom has its own assumptions about what knowledge is and how it should be shared, and learning to move between them has made me a clearer thinker and a more adaptable teacher.”

She brings that same perspective into her research, which tackles a question she says is often overlooked: How do we identify inequality that is hidden within measurements themselves?

“I study how a survey instrument can produce different responses depending on how its questions are worded,” she says. “For example, in a census, the way questions about race or about migration are phrased can shape who gets counted and how — which in turn affects how we understand inequality and design targeted policy.”

She put this argument into practice in recent work on racial boundary changes in her home country of Argentina, work that earned her this year’s Robin M. Williams Jr. Student Paper Award for the best empirical research paper.

“My paper asks how Argentina can be considered a ‘white’ nation when, depending on the survey, the share of people who identify as white has dropped from nearly ninety percent two decades ago to only half or two-thirds today,” she says. “Drawing on twelve nationally representative surveys from 2005 to 2023, I show that while racial identification shifts over time, skin tone remains strongly tied to socioeconomic outcomes — meaning that who counts as white can change while the underlying inequality, anchored in phenotype, stays firmly in place.”

She’s had success with additional work that’s appeared in several leading journals. A paper in which she built a socio-economic index for occupational stratification in Argentina published in Social Indicators Research; a study she conducted on ethnic classifications in algorithmic fairness appeared in the Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, and a book on social stratification - Libro de Cocina para el Análisis de las Clases Sociales en Argentina. All are available openly online.

She’s thoroughly enjoyed working across research teams spanning the Center for Population, Inequality, and Policy and the Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies as well as departments of education and sociology. She’s also grateful for the many mentors who’ve guided her work: Edward Telles, Distinguished Professor of sociology; Richard Arum, professor of sociology and education; Stanley Bailey, professor of sociology; and Rachel Goldberg, associate professor of sociology. “Together they have pushed me to be more rigorous and more ambitious and helped me broaden both my technical skills and my perspective on the field,” she says.

Having completed her third year in the program, Jaime is on track to graduate next year. Afterward, she hopes to build a career as a professor and researcher at a strong university, continuing to produce knowledge while also mentoring the next generation of scholars.

“As a first-generation student, I care deeply about reaching students who do not always see themselves reflected in academia, and this is the part of the work I hope to carry with me as a future professor,” she says. “I am building a research program that makes inequality visible where it usually hides — inside our own measurements. That is the kind of scholar, and mentor, I intend to be.”

 

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