Jacqueline Draper

Jackie is a Ph.D. student in Education Policy at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She studies how institutions and public policies shape gender and socioeconomic inequality, specifically in early education and care and in gender-based violence and harassment. She is interested in the gap between formal policies and people’s experiences of access and protection, and in measuring institutional processes that are difficult to observe in administrative data. Some of her current work examines access to early education and care and its implications for families and parental employment; the measurement and reporting of sexual and gender-based violence; and the use of natural language processing to measure equitable teaching practices in classroom discourse. She was selected as a Presidential Scholar by Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Before beginning her Ph.D., Jackie taught high school English, worked in after-school programming and social-emotional learning, and worked as a research analyst with the Zaentz Early Education Initiative. She also serves on the Political Action Committee Board of the Massachusetts National Organization for Women and has done advocacy work with organizations supporting women and survivors of sexual violence. Jackie holds an Ed.M. in Education Policy from HGSE and a B.A. in English and Latin American Studies from Boston College.