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 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 past projects have produced a series of additional books and articles that chart the sources, consequences, and social implications of gender, work, and family change in the modern era. These books give special attention to how Americans experience, impart meaning, and seek to resolve the dilemmas created by rising conflicts between work and family structures and 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 many efforts to promote work-family integration, gender inclusion, and social equality, I have contributed to a variety of media outlets and served 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 a founding board member of the Work-Family Researchers Network; and a board member of the Council on Contemporary Families.

Contact

Email

kathleen.gerson@nyu.edu

Twitter

@KathleenGerson

Books by Kathleen