E-mail: kathleen.gerson@nyu.edu

Kathleen Gerson is Professor of Sociology & Collegiate Professor of Arts & Science at New York University. Her work focuses on the connections among gender, work, and family life in post-industrial societies. She conducts research that combines qualitative, life history interviews with systematically collected samples to explain the links between social and individual change.

Kathleen's most recent book, The Unfinished Revolution: Coming of Age in a New Era of Gender, Work, & Family (Oxford, 2010; winner, William Goode Distinguished Book Award) addresses a new generation's experiences growing up amid changing families and blurring gender boundaries. The Unfinished Revolution shows how irreversible but incomplete change has created a growing clash between new egalitarian ideals and resistant social institutions. Although young women and men hope to fashion flexible, egalitarian gender strategies, they are falling back on less desirable options that are fostering a new gender divide between "self-reliant" women and "neo-traditional" men. The solution to these 21st century conundrums is to finish the gender revolution by creating more flexible, egalitarian workplaces and more child-supportive communities.

Kathleen is also the author or co-author of four additional books and over fifty articles, essays, and opinion pieces. Her first major work, Hard Choices: How Women Decide About Work, Career, and Motherhood (University of California, 1985), provided an early framework for understanding women's paths and strategies amid revolutionary shifts in work, marriage, and parenthood. Her next book, No Man's Land: Men's Changing Commitments to Family and Work (Basic Books, 1993), analyzed the pervasive but often ignored changes in men's lives. More recently, Gerson teamed with Jerry A. Jacobs (University of Pennsylvania) on The Time Divide: Family, Work, and Gender Inequality (Harvard University Press, 2004), which draws on census, survey, and cross-national data to explain how and why growing inequality in working time is dividing Americans in new ways.

Kathleen has held visiting positions at the Russell Sage Foundation (New York City) and the Center for the Study of the Life Course (Bremen, Germany) and has served as President of the Eastern Sociological Society, Sociology Department Chair, Chair of the Family Section of the American Sociological Association, and an editorial board member of the American Sociological Review and Work and Occupations. She has participated in a wide range of research and policy initiatives, including the Ford Foundation Project on Work, Family, and Community; the Sloan Foundation Research Network on Work-Family Issues; the Gender Module of the General Social Survey; and the Council of Research Advisors for Purdue's Center for Families."

Selected awards include:

Department of Sociology 
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