Kathleen Gerson: Different Ways of *Not* Having It All: Constructing Strategies of Gender, Work, and Care in an Age of Insecurity

Kathleen Gerson, Professor of Sociology and Collegiate Professor of Arts and Science, New York University.

As jobs become more precarious, intimate relationships more fragile, and public-private boundaries more porous, Americans face intensifying conflicts between earning a living and caring for others. How are today’s adults responding to these conflicts? What are the implications for gender and class inequality? And how do these new insecurities influence the prospects for more egalitarian work and family options?

Drawing on extensive interviews with a broad cross-section of residents in the Silicon Valley and New York areas, Kathleen Gerson will present a framework for mapping and explaining the strategies people are pursuing—in varying ways and with varying degrees of success—as they endeavor to build work ties, sustain intimate relationships, and care for children and other dependents in increasingly uncertain times.
 

About the speaker

Kathleen Gerson is Collegiate Professor of Arts and Science and Professor of Sociology at New York University, where she is recognized for her work on the changing connections between work and family structures and their links to gender inequality. Her most recent book, The Unfinished Revolution, is an award-winning study of how new generations have responded to the gender revolution that has transformed their life chances and pathways. In addition to a book-in-progress on “the science and art of interviewing,” she is at work on a book about how the new economy is reshaping patterns of work, caretaking, and politics in 21^st century America.