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​Caitlyn Collins

Director of Undergraduate Studies in Sociology
Associate Professor of Sociology

PhD, University of Texas at Austin
research interests:
  • Gender Inequality
  • Work
  • Families
  • Social Policy
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contact info:

  • Pronouns: She/Her/Hers
  • Email: c.collins@wustl.edu
  • Phone: +1 (314) 935-5790
  • Office: Seigle Hall, Suite 213

office hours:

  • By Appointment

mailing address:

  • Washington University
    MSC 1112-228-04
    One Brookings Drive
    St. Louis, MO 63130-4899

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. 

 

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Making Motherhood Work: How Women Manage Careers and Caregiving

Making Motherhood Work: How Women Manage Careers and Caregiving

By ​Caitlyn Collins

The work-family conflict that mothers experience today is a national crisis. Women struggle to balance breadwinning with the bulk of parenting, and stress is constant. Social policies don’t help. Of all Western industrialized countries, the United States ranks dead last for supportive work-family policies: No federal paid parental leave. The highest gender wage gap. No minimum standard for vacation and sick days. The highest maternal and child poverty rates. Can American women look to European policies for solutions? Making Motherhood Work draws on interviews that sociologist Caitlyn Collins conducted over five years with 135 middle-class working mothers in Sweden, Germany, Italy, and the United States. She explores how women navigate work and family given the different policy supports available in each country.

Taking readers into women’s homes, neighborhoods, and workplaces, Collins shows that mothers’ desires and expectations depend heavily on context. In Sweden—renowned for its gender-equal policies—mothers assume they will receive support from their partners, employers, and the government. In the former East Germany, with its history of mandated employment, mothers don’t feel conflicted about working, but some curtail their work hours and ambitions. Mothers in western Germany and Italy, where maternalist values are strong, are stigmatized for pursuing careers. Meanwhile, American working mothers stand apart for their guilt and worry. Policies alone, Collins discovers, cannot solve women’s struggles. Easing them will require a deeper understanding of cultural beliefs about gender equality, employment, and motherhood. With women held to unrealistic standards in all four countries, the best solutions demand that we redefine motherhood, work, and family.