Janet C. Gornick

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.