Jennifer Hook

Family Demography, Gender, Inequality, Work-Family, Social Policy, Comparative Sociology

• USC Center for the Changing Family,

Jennifer Hook (Ph.D. University of Washington, 2006) is Professor of Sociology at the University of Southern California.  Her research areas include gender, family demography, inequality, work-family, social policy, and comparative sociology. Hook focuses on how social contexts, particularly social policies and opportunities in the labor market, impact individuals and families. Her recent work examines the influence of country context on women’s employment, fathers’ time with children, and the division of household labor, as well as the impacts of state policy and practice on foster children’s outcomes and the economic vulnerability of parents involved with the child welfare system. Her research has appeared in journals including the American Sociological Review, the American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Journal of Marriage and Family, and the European Sociological Review.

In 2023-2025 she is serving as Vice President of the Work and Family Researchers Network, an international and interdisciplinary organization of work and family researchers.

Her book (co-authored with Becky Pettit of the University of Texas – Austin) Gendered Tradeoffs: Family, Social Policy, and Economic Inequality in Twenty-One Countries (Russell Sage Foundation 2009) was selected as a Noteworthy Book in Industrial Relations and Labor Economics in 2010. A related paper (also with Pettit) was a finalist for the 2006 Rosabeth Moss Kanter Award for Excellence in Work-Family Research as was her 2020 paper in the American Sociological Review “National Family Policies and Mothers’ Employment: How Earnings Inequality Shapes Policy Effects across and within Countries” (with Eunjeong Paek). She has also received the Aldi J.M. Hagenaars Memorial Award given to the best 2015 LIS Working Paper written by a scholar under the age of forty for her manuscript “Incorporating Class into Work-Family Arrangements: Insights from and for Three Worlds.”  And her 2006 paper “Care in context: Men’s unpaid work in 20 countries, 1965-2003” was awarded two ASA Section Outstanding Graduate Student Paper Awards (Sociology of the Family and Sociology of Sex and Gender).

Hook’s work has been funded by grants from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the Sloan Foundation, and the Center for Poverty Research at UC-Davis.  She is the recepient of fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, and the National Science Foundation. In AY 2018-19 she was a fellow at the WZB Berlin Social Sciences Center.

She has served on editorial board of the American Journal of Sociology, Journal of Marriage and Family, Social Forces, Social Problems, and Sociological Perspectives. From 2015-2018 and 2020-2022 she served as Director of Graduate Studies of the Sociology Department, and in 2022-2023 she served as Vice Chair.

Hook is an award-winning teacher and mentor. She has been awarded the Dornsife General Education Teaching Award (2014) and the USC Mentoring Award for Faculty Mentoring Graduate Students (2020). She regularly teaches Soci 169 Changing Family Forms, Soci 464 Gender & Work, Soci 651 Social Stratification, and Soci 680 Writing for Publication in Sociology.  

• Ph.D. Sociology, University of Washington, 2006