Research

Gender and Family Inequality

Much of my research examines gender and family inequality in the workplace and within families.

In a paper in Social Science Research, Dr. Florencia Torche, Tyler McDaniel, and I explore whether and how the practice of giving children of different-sex parents their father’s surname has changed over the last 25 years. To do so, we draw on more than two million birth records from New Jersey between 2000 and 2021. While we find a decline in the prevalence of patrilineal surnames, we find that the decline is most pronouced among foreign-born and Hispanic parents. Patrilineal surnames among U.S.-born parents remained highly prevelent across time, highlighting the persistence of gendered family scripts despite increasing gender equality in other domains. (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2026.103312)

Dr. Christin Munsch and I examine the extent of flexwork discontent among U.S. workers, as well as variation by gender, parental status, and race, to better understand how mismatches between workers’ actual flexwork arrangements and preferences may help explain both resistance to return-to-office mandates and recent declines in women’s labor-force participation. In a second project with Dr. Christin Munsch and co-authors at the University of South Carolina, we study whether flexible work arrangements exacerbate workplace biases by disproportionately disadvantaging those workers most likely to work flexibly (e.g., women, parents, caretakers, people with health-related disabilities) and if this has changed in the post-COVID era.

In my dissertation, I explore the research question: How do workplaces participate in defining and institutionalizing the boundaries between work and family? To answer this question, I analyze the way workplaces “talk” about work-family benefits across time, industry, and occupation, and predict the meso- and macro-level factors associated with the emergence of ways of taking about work-family. In particular, I focus on union collective bargining agreements.

Methods and Measurement

I am also interested in the way we measure social constructions like gender. In a paper with Dr. Aliya Saperstein (under review), we experimentally test how to best measure gender and sex in surveys. Current best-practice guidelines for surveys of English-speaking adults recommend a two-step approach, which uses two survey questions to measuure sex at birth and current identity. We explore three understudied formatting choices researchers face when using the two-step measure: (1) should sex or gender terms be used for the current identity item, (2) should the two questions appear on the same page or different pages in online surveys, and (3) in which order should the response options be presented? We find that researchers using the two-step approach can improve data quality by using gender terms for the current gender identity, and using a page break in online surveys. Varying the response option order does not have measurable effects on data quality.