Rebekah Burroway

Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies
Ph.D. Duke, 2011
Rebekah.Burroway@stonybrook.edu

Areas of Interest

Sociology of Beauty, Women's Empowerment, Sociology of the Body, Health and Wellbeing, Gender Inequality, International Development, Global Sociology, Statistical Methods, Ethnography

CV

Bio

In my newly emerging line of research, I use ethnographic methods to explore the social construction and consequences of beauty standards through participant observation and interviews with professional makeup artists. The specific aims of this project are to understand (1) how ideas about beauty standards are created; (2) how and why they change over time; and (3) how beauty ideals and practices affect people. Beauty ideas and practices deserve to be studied because they exact a substantial cost on society. Beauty has a price. The literal cost is quite staggering. Globally, retail sales of beauty products amount to over 600 billion dollars in 2025. This means that for the next 5 years, a fraction of global beauty spending could end extreme starvation and acute malnutrition. But, beauty practices are not just financial investments. Cross-cultural data suggests that women around the world spend hours a day on beauty enhancements. To put this in perspective, American women spend only about 37 minutes a day socializing, 28 minutes in educational activities, and 13 minutes helping non-household members, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The contrast is striking, and once again demonstrates the price of beauty. The amount of time, effort, and money that women invest in beauty products and routines suggests that this issue is of paramount importance and thus deserves to be understood better. Furthermore, beauty ideas and practices can have both positive and negative consequences for self-esteem and wellbeing. On one hand, such practices can be a form of self-expression that enhances authenticity and increases confidence. On the other hand, makeup use is sometimes associated with body dissatisfaction and self-objectification, and unrealistic beauty ideals can be harmful to both mental and physical health. Given these contrasting possibilities, along with the time and money that individuals spend, it is important to understand how to harness the potential for beauty ideas and practices to contribute to empowerment and wellness.

In another line of research, I use cross-national, quantitative methods to examine the impact of social structural forces on health, with an emphasis on women and children. Scholars, policymakers, and international development practitioners alike posit that women's empowerment is a key mechanism for enhancing health and wellbeing, especially in low-and middle-income countries (LMICs). But what does “empowerment” mean, how does it work, and how do we know it when we see it? That is, how can we measure women’s empowerment in a cross-national context and evaluate the impact that gender inequality has on families and societies? Focusing on women’s education, employment, and property rights, my work suggests that the relationship between women’s empowerment and wellbeing in LMICs is perhaps more complex than is commonly portrayed. Women’s empowerment can improve child health and often does. Indeed, some of my findings challenge the prevailing notion that economic development is the key to improving wellbeing in LMICs by demonstrating that the effects of women’s empowerment are comparable to or larger than those of gross domestic product per capita in some cases. However, the health benefits of women’s empowerment are neither universal nor guaranteed. Increasing women’s education and employment rates may not be enough to improve wellbeing if societies continue to prevent women from realizing their true potential and exclude them from full participation in social life.

Selected Publications

• Burroway, Rebekah and Kristen Shorette. 2024. “Working 9 to 5, Barely Gettting By: A Quantile Regression Analysis of Female Labor Force Participation and Infant Mortality, 1990 to 2016.” Sociology of Development 10(4): 432-453.
  
  
• Bhandari, Aarushi and Rebekah Burroway. (Equal authorship, listed alphabetically.) 2023. “Hold the Phone! A Cross-National Analysis of Women’s Education, Mobile Phones, and HIV Infections in Low- and Middle-Income Countries, 1990-2018.” Social Science & Medicine 334.
  
  
• Shorette, Kristen, and Rebekah Burroway. 2022. “Consistencies and Contradictions: Revisiting the Relationship Between Women’s Education and Infant Mortality From a Distributional Perspective.” Social Science Research 105: 1-13.