[2] At the time of her death, she was Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at Harvard University.
As part of her doctoral dissertation research Pager conducted an experiment in which she enlisted young men to pose as job applicants with similar characteristics.
She later replicated the experiment in 2009 with Bruce Western and Naomi Sugle and found that black applicants without criminal records received fewer callbacks than white applicants with criminal records.
[8] The dissertation was awarded the "Best Dissertation Prize" by the American Sociological Association[9] and was later published as a series of articles[10] and a book, Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration (University of Chicago Press, 2007).
Pager's work has been widely featured in the media, including The New York Times,[11][12][13] The Wall Street Journal,[14][15] the Chicago Tribune,[16] and in CNN's documentary Black in America.