Janet C. Gornick

Janet Gornick attended Harvard University, where she was awarded a B.A. (psychology and social relations, 1980), an M.P.A. (Kennedy School, 1987), and a Ph.D. (political economy and government, 1994). She is currently a professor of political science and sociology at the Graduate Center, CUNY. From September 2006 to August 2016, she served as director of LIS (formerly the Luxembourg Income Study), a cross‐national data archive and research center located in Luxembourg, with a satellite office at the Graduate Center. Since 2016, she has served as director of the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center on Socio‐Economic Inequality. She has held the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Distinguished Chair in Socio-Economic Inequality since it was established in 2021. The Stone Center includes the LIS satellite office, known as the U.S. Office of LIS.

Most of her research is comparative and concerns social welfare policies and their impact on gender disparities in the labor market and/or on income inequality. She is the co‐author or co‐editor of four books: Families That Work: Policies for Reconciling Parenthood and Employment (Russell Sage Foundation, 2003), Gender Equality: Transforming Family Divisions of Labor (Verso Press, 2009), Income Inequality: Economic Disparities and the Middle Class in Affluent Countries (Stanford University Press, 2013), and Measuring Distribution and Mobility of Income and Wealth (University of Chicago Press, 2022).

She has published articles on gender inequality, employment, and social policy in many journals, including American Sociological Review, Annual Review of Sociology, Social Forces, Socio‐Economic Review, Journal of European Social Policy, European Sociological Review, Social Science Quarterly, Monthly Labor Review, Feminist Economics, Journal of Economic Inequality, and Social Indicators Research.

She served as as a guest editor for “Work‐Family Reconciliation Policies in High‐Employment Economies: Policy Designs and their Consequences,” a special double issue of the Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis (2006‐2007), and for “Single-Parent Families and Public Policy: Evidence from High-Income Countries”, a volume of The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (2022). She also regularly presents her work in popular venues, including The American Prospect, Dissent, and Challenge Magazine.

Her research has been generously supported by many sponsors, including the Russell Sage Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM), the Department of Health and Human Services (USDHHS), the Social Security Administration (SSA), the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Governors’ Association (NGA), the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and the World Bank.

She serves on several advisory and editorial boards, including for the Society for the Study of Economic Inequality (ECINEQ); the Foundation for International Studies on Social Security (FISS); Pathways Magazine; the Washington Center for Equitable Growth (WCEG); The Russell Sage Foundation Journal; the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR); and the Journal of European Social Policy.