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Caitlyn Collins        

Assistant Professor of Sociology at Washington University

Caitlyn Collins is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Washington University in St. Louis. She conducts cross-national qualitative research on gender inequality in the workplace and family life, primarily focusing on working mothers' experiences across western industrialized countries. Recently, she engaged in collaborative, quantitative research to probe how the COVID-19 pandemic shapes mothers’ employment.

Collins' first book "Making Motherhood Work: How Women Manage Careers and Caregiving" published in 2019 is an in-depth interview study of 135 middle-class working mothers in Sweden, Germany, Italy and the United States, four countries that offer distinct policy approaches to reconciling work-family conflict. She explored how different ideals of gender, motherhood and employment are embedded in these policies, and how they shape the daily lives of mothers in these countries. 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.

Her work also appears in peer-reviewed journals such as Science, Gender & Society, Journal of Marriage and Family, American Behavioral Scientist, Qualitative Sociology and more. Outside academia, she has written for public audiences in The Atlantic, Slate, Harvard Business Review and The New York Times.

She is a 2019 Nancy Weiss Malkiel Scholar (Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation) and a 2018 Work and Family Researchers Network Early Career Fellow. Collins' research is supported by the National Science Foundation, American Association of University Women and German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), among others. She has a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Texas at Austin and a bachelor’s degree from Whitman College. She was a visiting researcher at the Linnaeus Center on Social Policy and Family Dynamics in Europe (SPaDE) at Stockholm University (Stockholm, Sweden), the WZB Berlin Social Science Center (Berlin, Germany) and the Department of Political Science at Roma Tre University (Rome, Italy).

News

The corporate ideals driving ‘secret parenting’
Then there’s the enduring stereotype that women are more capable in the domestic sphere, men in the office, which despite being dispelled by research still has a significant impact on how we frame paid work and family life. “It’s understandable that women feel this relentless work/family conflict because we’re asking the impossible. Women have entered the paid labour force, but we have not seen the changes in men at home to pick up more of the domestic work,” says sociologist Caitlyn Collins of Washington University in St Louis.
Mother’s Day Has Always Been Complicated, But The Pandemic Has Proven It’s Broken
“I see Mother’s Day in the United States as a bit of an insult,” Caitlyn Collins, a professor of sociology at Washington University in St. Louis and author of Making Motherhood Work: How Women Manage Careers and Caregiving, tells Refinery29. “The United States has the most family-hostile public policy of any wealthy Western country."
The Worsening Gender Divide At Work: How 3 Western Nations Supported Families During The Pandemic, Or Didn’t
Parents cannot go to work if they don’t have childcare for their kids. This fundamental economic reality has come into glaring relief during the past year. The Covid-19 pandemic has only exacerbated the struggle families, and particularly working mothers, face to find safe and reliable care for their children so that they can go to work. Now, a new study looks at how three western nations handled the childcare crisis that coronavirus has created
The one word women need to be saying more often
If you're a woman, when was the last time you said "no" to a friend, your partner, a colleague or your kid? When the school asked if you could volunteer on the committee, you said "yes" even though the thought of one more thing on your plate made you want to scream. When the boss asked if you could push up a deadline, you said "yes" even though you knew the request was unreasonable. When the masseuse asked if you liked the pressure, you said "yes" even though it felt like your body was breaking.

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