Janet Gornick

Director, Stone Center
Professor of Political Science and Sociology
James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Distinguished Chair in Socio-Economic Inequality
CUNY Graduate Center

Janet Gornick joined the CUNY faculty in 1994 and is currently professor of political science and sociology at the Graduate Center. From 2006 to 2016, she served as director of LIS (formerly the Luxembourg Income Study), a cross‐national data archive and research center located in Luxembourg. Since 2016, she has served as director of the Graduate Center’s Stone Center on Socio‐Economic Inequality, and 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, poverty, income inequality, or wealth concentration. She is the coauthor or coeditor 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 served as a guest editor for several journal issues, including a double issue of the Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis focused on work-family reconciliation policies (2006–2007), and “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).

Her research has been published 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 also regularly presents her work in popular venues, including The American Prospect, Dissent, and Challenge Magazine.

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 the recipient of an Honorary Doctorate from Stockholm University and is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Curriculum Vitae

Selected Work

Course Offerings

Areas of Expertise

Gender and Work

Income Inequality

Social Welfare Policy

Cross-national Comparisons

LIS and LWS Data

Featured Work

Book cover of Income InequalityIncome Inequality: Economic Disparities and the Middle Class in Affluent Countries
Edited by Janet C. Gornick and Markus Jäntti

This state-of-the-art volume presents comparative, empirical research on a topic that has long preoccupied scholars, politicians, and everyday citizens: economic inequality. While income and wealth inequality across all populations is the primary focus, the contributions to this book pay special attention to the middle class, a segment often not addressed in inequality literature.


Selected Work

Gender and Poverty

J.C. Gornick and N. Boeri. In The Oxford Handbook of the Social Science of Poverty. D. Brady and L.M. Burton (eds). pp. 221-246. New York: Oxford University Press. 2016.

Child Poverty in America: Investing in Our Future

November 21, 2023|

When the enhanced Child Tax Credit of 2021 was not renewed by Congress, millions of American children fell back into poverty. A panel moderated by Carol Jenkins and featuring Regina S. Baker, Kathryn J. Edin, Janet Gornick, and Zachary Parolin discusses what we can and should do now.