Karen Romero

Karen Romero is a PhD candidate in the Political Science and International Relations department at USC. Her main fields of study are American Politics, Quantitative Methods, and Race and Gender Politics. Karen’s dissertation, “The Personal is Political: How Sexist Experiences Shape Support For Feminist Policies” is an interrogation into how gendered and sexist experiences with sexual harassment and women’s healthcare have impacted women’s support for feminist policy attitudes, stratified across racial groups. This project situates a national survey data set into the political context of the 2024 transition into the Trump administration and the continued suppression of women’s rights. Within this work, Karen operationalizes support feminist policy attitudes along three dimensions of women’s reproductive rights: abortion, access to birth control, and childcare. Karen is set to defend her dissertation in the Spring of 2027.  Karen also works as a freelance journalist, and is a regular contributor to the environmental and social justice online publication, Red Canary Magazine.

• BA Whittier College, 5/2021