About

I am an Associate Professor of Sociology at Washington University in St. Louis. I study gender inequality in the workplace and family life. My research examines how culture and policy intersect to reduce and reproduce inequality. My work aims to advance the rights and status of women, and to secure federal work-family policy supports for U.S. families like paid parental leave and affordable childcare that are the norm in peer nations.

Most of my work to date uses cross-national interview methods to investigate working mothers’ experiences across wealthy western countries. Some collaborative, quantitative research probes how the COVID-19 pandemic has shaped mothers’ employment. Two new interview projects explore the market for childcare and the possibilities of feminist families.

My first book is Making Motherhood Work: How Women Manage Careers and Caregiving (2019, Princeton University Press). Drawing on years of in-depth interview research in Sweden, Germany, Italy, and the United States, I show that mothers’ struggles are not inevitable and they can’t be resolved by individual efforts at “balance.” Instead, I argue that parents everywhere need work-family justice: a system in which women and men have the opportunity and power to participate fully in paid work and family life. This shift calls for nothing less than a revolution in our public policy and cultural beliefs about employment and caregiving. This book received the 2020 William J. Goode Book Award from the American Sociological Association’s Family Section, and was featured widely in the popular press.

My work also appears in Science, Gender & Society, Journal of Marriage and Family, Annual Review of Sociology, Demography, American Behavioral Scientist, and other academic journals and books. My research is supported by the National Science Foundation, Russell Sage Foundation, and American Association of University Women, among others.

Outside academia, I’ve written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Harvard Business Review, and Slate, and consulted for companies such as Pepsi and The New York Times on women’s rights.

I received my PhD in Sociology from The University of Texas at Austin and my BA in Sociology from Whitman College. I live with my partner and daughter in St. Louis, Missouri.