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 in-depth interviewing with research designs that stress systematic sampling and theoretical discovery, my projects focus 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 in the Silicon Valley and New York metropolitan areas, this book-in-progress, tentatively titled “Why No One Can Have It All: The Collision of Earning and Caregiving in the New Economy,” explores how the precarious conditions of the new economy are reshaping patterns of work, intimate commitment, and caregiving across a diverse range of workers and caretakers.
In another ongoing project, I am collaborating 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 are examining how the collapse of an already thin caregiving infrastructure has combined with massive changes in paid work arrangements to reshape Americans’ caregiving and employment practices.
Looking back, my earlier projects have produced a series of books and articles charting the sources, consequences, and social implications of gender, work, and family change in the modern era, with special attention to how Americans experience, impart meaning, and seek to resolve the dilemmas created by rising conflicts between work and family structures. These books include:
The Unfinished Revolution: Coming of Age in a New Era of Gender, Work, and Family (Oxford, 2011) is a first-hand account of the “children of the gender revolution” – a generation who grew up in changing families where mothers went to work and households took a variety of forms. These young adults viewed their families as unfolding pathways rather than the static family types so often portrayed by pundits. And regardless of the pathway their own family followed, most young women and men shared a desire to balance work and caregiving and create a committed, gender-flexible partnership. Yet as they looked to the future, they also concluded that an incomplete and uneven revolution would place these ideals out of reach and prepared to fall back on less desirable options. The Unfinished Revolution garnered national attention and received the Goode Distinguished Book Award from the American Sociological Association.
In The Time Divide: Work, Family, and Gender Inequality (Harvard, 2004), Jerry Jacobs and I examine how changes in American patterns of working time have created a new form of social inequality between the overworked and underemployed. Drawing on census, survey, and cross-national data, we find that the U.S. workforce has become increasingly divided between those who put in very long workweeks at time-demanding jobs (especially among men employed in professional occupations) and those who find it difficult to secure enough work to keep their families afloat (especially among employed women and men working in lower-wage jobs). Yet whether they lack enough time for life beyond the workplace or seek more time at work, most Americans – including women and men from all social classes – would prefer a more equitable balance for themselves and their families. Strategy+Business Magazine named The Time Divide as a “Best Book” (placing it at the top of the work-life category), and Contemporary Sociology designated it as one of twelve most influential books on family change.
As one of the earliest studies to investigate how the gender revolution has transformed men's lives, No Man’s Land: Men’s Changing Commitments to Family and Work (Basic Books, 1993) unpacks men’s responses to the new contradictions of American manhood. Although cultural standards continue to stress the centrality of successful breadwinning, men of all backgrounds face a shrinking pool of secure, well-paid jobs that would put this ideal within reach. As the status of "good provider" has become increasingly burdensome, a growing proportion of middle- and working-class men have rejected this singular goal. Faced with cross-pressures that expect men to take on more domestic responsibilities yet also make it easier to reject marriage and parental involvement, men are responding in varied and even polarized ways -- with some resisting family commitments altogether while others seek more involvement as fathers and domestic partners. The New York Times Book Review selected No Man’s Land as a noteworthy paperback.
My first book, Hard Choices: How Women Decide About Work, Career, and Motherhood (California, 1985), focuses on the revolution in women’s work participation that began in the later decades of the 20th century and set the stage for the larger gender revolution to follow. As one of the first studies to recognize the magnitude of women’s movement into the paid labor force, it offers an early framework for charting the changing pathways of women’s lives as new opportunities arose outside the home and new insecurities mounted within it. Hard Choices demonstrates that women’s commitments to work and motherhood cannot be reduced to a hypothesized feminine personality. Instead, women's diverse choices reflect active efforts to build a viable life path amid the expansion of opportunities outside the home and the emergence of new fragilities in intimate partnerships. Hard Choices was a finalist for the Society for the Study of Social Problems’ C. Wright Mills Award and the American Sociological Association’s Goode Distinguished Book Award.
Over the years, I have also endeavored to contribute to a range of efforts to promote work-family integration, gender inclusion, and social equality. These have included 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; founding editorial board member of the Work-Family Researchers Network; board member of the Council on Contemporary Families; editorial board member of the American Sociological Review, Work and Occupations, and the ASA Rose Monograph Series; and numerous contributions to print, digital, and mass media.
Over the years, these efforts have also brought some gratifying recognition from a range of organizations, including:
Top Ten Extraordinary Contributor to Work and Family Research, Work and Family Researchers Network (2018)
AKD Distinguished Lecturer, Alpha Kappa Delta International Sociology Honorary Society (2018)
Guggenheim Fellow, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2017)
Distinguished Career Award, Family Section, American Sociological Association (2017)
Top 25 Work-Family Scholars in the World, Google Scholar rankings (2017)
Distinguished Merit Award, Eastern Sociological Society (in recognition of a distinguished scholar who has made outstanding contributions to the discipline, the profession, and the ESS) (2014)
Jessie Bernard Award, American Sociological Association (in recognition of distinguished scholarly work that has enlarged sociology to encompass fully the role of women and gender in society) (2013)
William J. Goode Distinguished Book Award, American Sociological Association Family Section (for The Unfinished Revolution: Coming of Age in a New Era of Gender, Work, and Family) (2012)
Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University (2011-12)
Kingsley Birge Endowed Lecture, Colby College (2011)
Charles Phelps Taft Annual Lecture, Charles Phelps Taft Research Center, University of Cincinnati (2008)
Honorable Mention, Mirra Komarovsky Book Award, Eastern Sociological Society (for The Time Divide: Work, Family, and Gender Inequality) (2005)
A “Best Book” (first in “Work and Life” category), Strategy+Business Magazine (for The Time Divide: Work, Family, and Gender Inequality) (2005)
Elected to Sociological Research Association (2004)
Rosabeth Moss Kanter Award for Excellence in Work-Family Research (2003)
Distinguished Feminist Lecturer, Sociologists for Women in Society (1998)
Invited Visiting Research Scholar, Center for the Study of Status Passages and Risks in the Life Course, University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany (1995)
Visiting Scholar, Russell Sage Foundation, New York City (1987-88)
Finalist, C. Wright Mills Award (for Hard Choices: How Women Decide About Work, Career, and Motherhood) (1986)
Finalist, William J. Goode Distinguished Book Award (for Hard Choices: How Women Decide About Work, Career, and Motherhood) (1986)
Presidential Fellow, New York University (1985)
N.I.M.H. Predoctoral Fellowship in Personality and Social Structure (1978-79)
Coro Fellowship in Public Affairs (1969-70)
Elected to Phi Beta Kappa (1969)
