Professor Collins studies gender, work-family dynamics, and social policy.
Collins is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Washington University in St. Louis. She studies gender inequality in the workplace and family life. Her work aims to advance the rights and status of women, and to secure federal work-family policy supports for U.S. families like paid parental leave and affordable childcare that are the norm in peer nations.
Most of her work to date uses cross-national interview methods to investigate working mothers’ experiences across wealthy western countries. Some collaborative, quantitative research probes how the COVID-19 pandemic has shaped parents’ employment. Her current interview project explores the U.S. market for childcare.
Collins' 2019 book is Making Motherhood Work: How Women Manage Careers and Caregiving (Princeton University Press). Drawing on years of in-depth interview research in Sweden, Germany, Italy, and the United States, she shows that mothers’ struggles are not inevitable and they can’t be resolved by individual efforts at “balance.” Instead, she argues that parents need work-family justice: a system in which women and men have the opportunity and power to participate fully in paid work and family life. This shift requires changes in our public policy and cultural beliefs about employment and caregiving. 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 Science, Gender & Society, Journal of Marriage and Family, Annual Review of Sociology, Demography, and other academic journals and books. Collins' research is supported by the National Science Foundation, Russell Sage Foundation, and American Association of University Women, among others.
Outside academia, she has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and Harvard Business Review, and consulted for companies such as Pepsi and The New York Times on the challenges working parents face today.
For more, please visit: caitlyncollins.com.