My name is Michelle Eilers (she/her). I am a quantitative sociologist and social demographer, and my research interests include gender and sexuality, health and wellbeing, social psychology, and cultural sociology. I use diverse quantitative methods and design surveys and experiments to answer questions about how social norms about sexual behavior and relationships are adopted and deployed in complementary and countervailing ways throughout adulthood. My sole-authored papers are published in Socius and Demography and my collaborative research has been published in Pediatrics, Demography, Journal of Marriage and Family, and Contraception, among others. 

My sole author paper, published October 2024 in Socius, offers one of the first assessments of the temporal ordering of and relationship between sexual attitudes and behaviors. I find that many young women oppose premarital sex before themselves becoming sexually active, yet this attitude does not reduce the probability of having premarital sex. For those who have sex, only some become less opposed while others still oppose the behavior in which they engaged. This study has implications for the role of personal attitudes in determining and succeeding intimate and contested behaviors.

Another paper, published in Demography,  foregrounds the centrality of young women's sexual desires in determining her sexual and reproductive behaviors, moving beyond decades of research that emphasize the role of women's fertility desires on their reproductive behaviors. I find that women's sexual desires often play a stronger role on sex and contraceptive use than her pregnancy desires, when considered together. This finding is especially relevant to dispelling notions that women's sexual desire is less than men's and to acknowledging that young adults spend significant time - an average of a decade - having sex purely for enjoyment before deciding to have children, if they ever decide to pursue parenthood at all. 

My research has been generously funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), PEO International, and the UT Graduate School, and recognized with awards from the Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP), the Midwest Sociological Society (MSS), and the UT College of Liberal Arts Dean's Distinguished PhD Graduate Award.

I completed a Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin in May 2023 and am a postdoctoral research fellow at the Minnesota Population Center at the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities. I earned an MSc in Demography and Health from The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and a BA in Anthropology and Community Health from Tufts University.