About Laura

Laura Kray is a Professor at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, holding the Ned and Carol Spieker Leadership Chair.

As faculty director of the Center for Equity, Gender, and Leadership and faculty affiliate of Berkeley’s Psychology Department, she investigates workplace social dynamics, focusing on gender-based disparities in power, compensation, and career advancement.

A fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and the Society of Personality and Social Psychology, Laura has held fellowships at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences and Harvard Kennedy School’s Women and Public Policy Program. She received UC Berkeley’s prestigious Schwabacher Fellowship for assistant professors.

Her National Science Foundation-funded research has garnered multiple awards, including “best empirical paper” from the International Association of Conflict Management and “most influential paper” from the Academy of Management. As former editor-in-chief of Research in Organizational Behavior, she has published over 90 articles in leading journals including Psychological Science, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.

Laura writes about gender equity and counterfactual thinking for major publications like the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post. Her research has been featured in the New York Times, Forbes, and The Atlantic. In 2022, she appeared on the chart-topping podcast “Archetypes” with Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, and has been interviewed on NPR’s Hidden Brain and Marketplace.

An award-winning educator, Laura teaches MBA and PhD courses in Gender, Equity, and Leadership and Negotiations. She received the inaugural Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Teaching Award from Berkeley-Haas Executive MBA Program in 2022 for integrating DEI principles into her teaching methodology.

Laura earned her Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Washington and B.A. in organizational studies from the University of Michigan. Before joining Berkeley, she completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and taught at the University of Arizona’s Eller College of Management.