In a few words...
As Professor of Sociology and Collegiate Professor of Arts and Science at New York University, my work focuses on the sources, shapes, and consequences of the intertwined revolutions in gender, work, and private life taking place in the United States and across the globalizing world. To make sense of these connections, my books and articles draw on in-depth interviewing and quantitative techniques to uncover the ways personal experiences and unfolding biographies intersect with social institutions in flux to shape the contours of social and individual change as people grow to and through adulthood and strive to fashion commitments to paid work and family life.
By combining the deep understandings afforded by interviewing with research designs that stress systematic sampling and theoretical discovery, my work focuses on how large-scale institutional change prompts individuals, communities, and social groups to develop new ways of living and how, in turn, these social actors reshape the contours of social institutions and political debates. My most recent book, The Science and Art of Interviewing (co-authored with Sarah Damaske, Oxford, 2020) provides an overview of and practical guide to this approach.
Drawing on these research techniques, I’m currently at work on a book about how Americans are responding to the work-care crisis created by a growing collision between paid work and unpaid caregiving. Based on interviews with a broad cross-section of mid-life adults living in places on the cutting edge of social and economic change (such as the Silicon Valley and New York metropolitan areas), this book, tentatively titled “Why No One Can Have It All: The Collision of Earning and Caregiving in an Era of Insecurity,” explores how the precarious conditions of the 21st century economy are reshaping patterns of work, intimate commitment, and caregiving across a diverse range of workers and caregivers.
In another recent project, I have collaborated with Professors Jennifer Glass (UT Austin), Jerry A. Jacobs (U Penn), Barbara Risman (U Illinois at Chicago), and a group of gifted graduate researchers to study “Work and Caregiving in the Covid Pandemic and Beyond.” Based on extended interviews with a national sample of workers and caregivers, we examined how the collapse of an already thin caregiving infrastructure combined with massive changes in paid work arrangements to reshape Americans’ caregiving and employment practices.
Looking back, my past projects have produced a series of additional books and articles that chart the sources, consequences, and social implications of revolutionary shifts in gender, work, and family life in the modern era. These books give special attention to how Americans experience, impart meaning, and seek to resolve the dilemmas created by the inexorable rise of conflicts between paid work and family structures, with a special focus on gender has shaped both the nature of and response to these conflicts. These books include “The Unfinished Revolution” (Oxford, 2011); “The Time Divide” (with Jerry Jacobs, Harvard, 2004); “No Man’s Land” (Basic Books, 1993); and “Hard Choices” (California, 1985).
Among my ongoing efforts to promote work-family integration, gender inclusion, and social equality, I have contributed to a variety of media outlets and served in a range of professional capacities. In academia, these efforts include serving as Vice President of the American Sociological Association, President of the Eastern Sociological Society, Co-President of Sociologists for Women in Society, Chair of the Family Section of the American Sociological Association, and on the Executive Committee of the Sociological Research Association. As a participant in national and international debates surrounding gender, work, and family change, these efforts include serving as well as a founding board member of the Work-Family Researchers Network and the Council on Contemporary Families.
Books by Kathleen
The Unfinished Revolution: Coming of Age in a New Era of Gender, Work, and Family
A first-hand account of the experiences, outlooks, and strategies of “the children of the gender revolution,” who grew up during the recent period of sweeping family and gender changes and are creating new forms of working and loving.
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The Time Divide: Work, Family, and Gender Inequality
A panoramic study of why and how time pressures have emerged in contemporary life and what we can do to alleviate them.
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The Science and Art of Interviewing
A theoretical and practical guide to in-depth interviewing as an essential strategy for learning about society and human experience.
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Hard Choices: How Women Decide About Work, Career, and Motherhood
An early and influential study of the how women experience and cope with work-family conflicts as they face a revolution in their work and family options.
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No Man’s Land: Men’s Changing Commitments to Family and Work
A sympathetic overview of the challenges facing contemporary men and the responses they are formulating in a world where women are as likely as men to seek personal independence and to shoulder the responsibilities of supporting a family.