Pascoe started her career as a sociologist right out of graduate school, working as a consultant for the Digital Youth Project in California founded by The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

The third objective is to advise software designers about how to use kids' innovative approaches to knowledge and learning in building better software.”[2] While Pascoe was working with the Digital Youth Project, she studied teens and how they used new media.

She spent a year and a half following teenage boys in a high school in California and found that they prove their masculinity by calling each other negative homosexual slurs.

These are, again, primarily women who take pride in their ability to deny themselves food and to keep their weight at this artificially low and dangerous level”.

[4] Pascoe's research has been featured in the New York Times,[5] The Wall Street Journal,[6] The Globe and Mail, American Sexuality Magazine and Inside Higher Ed.