Caitlyn Collins

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).