Bio:
Kathleen Gerson is Professor of Sociology and the 2008-2009 President of the Eastern Sociological Society. She has held visiting positions at the Russell Sage Foundation (New York City) and the Center for the Study of Status Passages and Risks in the Life Course (Bremen, Germany) and has served as Sociology Department Chair, Chair of the ASA Family Section, and an editorial board member of the American Sociological Review and Work and Occupations.

The author or co-author of five books and numerous articles, Gerson's work has focused on the connections among gender, work, and family life in post-industrial America. Her research has sought to combine the deep understandings of qualitative, life history interviews with the rigor of systematically collected samples and carefully situated comparisons. Her theoretical concern has been to explain the interactive links between processes of social and individual change, with a special focus on how institutional conflicts and contradictions prompt creative human action.

Her book, 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. A finalist for the C. Wright Mills Award and the William J. Goode Distinguished Book Award, Hard Choices continues to inform ongoing debates about women's work and family commitments. 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 and charted men's responses to institutional shifts that have given them both expanded freedom to avoid family responsibilities and rising incentives to become more involved in family life. No Man's Land was chosen as an ASA "Author Meets the Critics" featured book and selected as a "new and noteworthy" paperback by The New York Times Book Review.

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. The Time Divide was named a "best business book" by Strategy Business magazine, received honorable mention for the Mirra Komarovsky Book Award, and was featured at "Author Meets the Critics" sessions for the ASA, the ESS, and the Southern Sociological Society. Work from this project also received the Rosabeth Moss Kanter Award for Excellence in Work-Family Research.

Kathleen is now completing a new book, provisionally titled Children of the Gender Revolution: The Unexpected Consequences of Work and Family Change (forthcoming from Oxford University Press), which examines a new generation's experiences growing up amid changing families and blurring gender boundaries. This project analyzes how and why the growing clash between new egalitarian ideals and resistant institutions has prompted young women and men to develop more flexible outlooks and gender strategies.

Gerson has participated in a wide range of research and policy initiatives, including the Ford Foundation Project on Integrating Work, Family, and Community; the Sloan Foundation Research Network on Work-Family Issues; the Gender Module of the General Social Survey; the Council of Research Advisors for Purdue's Center for Families; and Catalyst's Advisory Board for "The Next Generation of Women Leaders." She was named Distinguished Feminist Lecturer on Women and Social Change by the Sociologists for Women in Society (1998) and the Charles Phelps Taft Lecturer (University of Cincinnati, 2008). As a board member of the Council on Contemporary Families, she recently co-organized a national symposium (with Janet Gornick and Joan Williams), entitled "Who Cares? Dilemmas of Work and Family in the 21st Century," that brought experts and journalists together to consider cutting edge research on these critical issues.

Kathleen grew up in Montgomery, Alabama, and San Francisco, California. After receiving her B.A. from Stanford University and her Ph.D. from Berkeley, she moved to New York City and settled in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where she and her spouse, John Mollenkopf, reared their daughter, Emily, and currently reside.