Jennifer Hook
· Florence Everline Professor of Sociology, Sociology Department ChairUniversity of Southern California · Sociology
Active 1999–2026
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About
Jennifer L. Hook is the Florence Everline Professor of Sociology at the University of Southern California and serves as the Chair of the Department of Sociology. She earned her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Washington in 2006. Her research focuses on gender stratification, family demography, work-family policy, and comparative sociology. Her work examines how social contexts influence gendered divisions of work and care in the US and Europe, including women’s employment, fathers’ time with children, and household labor division. She has published in prominent journals such as the American Sociological Review, the American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, the Journal of Marriage and Family, and the European Sociological Review. She is serving as President of the Work and Family Researchers Network from 2025 to 2027, having previously served as Vice President. Her research has received multiple awards, including finalist positions for the Rosabeth Moss Kanter Award for Excellence in Work-Family Research, the IPUMS Time Use Research Award, and the Aldi J.M. Hagenaars Memorial Award. She co-authored the book 'Gendered Tradeoffs: Family, Social Policy, and Economic Inequality in Twenty-One Countries,' which was recognized as a Noteworthy Book in Industrial Relations and Labor Economics. Recognized for her teaching and mentorship, she has received the Dornsife General Education Teaching Award and the USC Mentoring Award for Faculty Mentoring Graduate Students. Her…
Research topics
- Economics
- Demographic economics
- Economic growth
- Developmental psychology
- Social psychology
- Medicine
- Psychology
Selected publications
American Sociological Review · 2020 · 96 citations
1st authorCorrespondingAlthough researchers generally agree that national family policies play a role in shaping mothers' employment, there is considerable debate about whether, how, and why policy effects vary across country contexts and within countries by mothers' educational attainment. We hypothesize that family policies interact with national levels of earnings inequality to differentially affect the employment outcomes of mothers by educational attainment. We develop hypotheses about the two most commonly studi…
Occupational characteristics and parents' childcare time
Journal of Marriage and Family · 2021 · 22 citations
1st authorCorrespondingAbstract Objective This study examines how occupational resources and demands are associated with parents' childcare time. Background Scholars recognize parental employment as important for understanding parental time use. Yet, given data limitations, we know relatively little about how strain‐based demands (demands that can produce negative psychological states) are associated with parent's time with children. Method Occupational‐level data in the O*NET Database are linked to the American Time…
European Sociological Review · 2022-10-10 · 21 citations
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingAbstract Some scholars hypothesize that although work–family policies help incorporate women into the labour market, they do so by integrating women, and mothers specifically, into female-dominated occupations. Some suggest that although these policies are ‘good’ for lower educated women, they harm higher educated women by concentrating them in female-dominated professions. We revisit this debate using the highest quality data brought to bear on this question to date. We use the EU Labour Force…
Population and Development Review · 2020-10-08 · 15 citations
article1st authorCorrespondingAbstract While women's labor force participation rates (LFPRs) in the United States stalled over the last quarter‐century, European countries exhibited a variety of trajectories. We draw on demographic and gender theories of women's life course to understand changes in women's LFPR during their prime child‐rearing years. We build expectations about how aggregate trends may be driven by shifts in the prevalence of key demographic events such as child‐rearing (i.e., compositional) versus shifts in…
National Work-Family Policies and Gender Earnings Inequality in 26 OECD Countries, 1999 to 2019
Socius Sociological Research for a Dynamic World · 2025-07-30 · 1 citations
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingThe authors investigate whether work-family policies help incorporate women into the labor market, but exacerbate the gender earnings gap and motherhood penalty, especially for mothers and/or tertiary-educated women. The authors use repeated cross-sectional income data from the Luxembourg Income Study database (1999–2019) ( n = 26 countries, 280 country-years, 2.9 million employees) combined with an original collection of indicators on work-family policies, labor market conditions, and gender no…
Recent grants
NIH · $152k · 2011
Frequent coauthors
- 71 shared
Eunjeong Paek
University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
- 9 shared
Mark E. Courtney
University of Chicago
- 9 shared
Jo Ann Lee
University at Buffalo, State University of New York
- 7 shared
Becky Pettit
The University of Texas at Austin
- 7 shared
Jennifer L. Romich
- 7 shared
Maureen O. Marcenko
- 5 shared
Christina Marie Wolfe
Pennsylvania State University
- 4 shared
Ji Young Kang
Chungnam National University
Awards & honors
- Rosabeth Moss Kanter Award for Excellence in Work-Family Res…
- IPUMS Time Use Research Award (2022)
- Aldi J.M. Hagenaars Memorial Award (2015)
- Sociological Research Association (2023)
- Dornsife General Education Teaching Award (2014)
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