Jennifer Hook

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

• USC Center for the Changing Family,

Jennifer L. Hook (Ph.D. University of Washington, 2006) is the Florence Everline Professor of Sociology at the University of Southern California. Her research areas include gender stratification, family demography, work-family policy, and comparative sociology. Her research examines how social contexts affect gendered divisions of work and care in the US and Europe, including women’s employment, fathers’ time with children, and the division of household labor.  Her recent publications appear in the American Sociological Review, the American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Journal of Marriage and Family, and the European Sociological Review, amongst others. In 2025-2027 she is serving as President of the Work and Family Researchers Network, an international and interdisciplinary organization of work and family researchers. She served as Vice President in 2023-2025.

Hook’s research has won mutiple awards. Her work has twice (2021 and 2006) been a finalist Rosabeth Moss Kanter Award for Excellence in Work-Family Research (one of five finalists chosen from over 2500 research articles published in the interdisciplinary field of work and family research internationally). Another paper was awarded the 2022 IPUMS Time Use Research Award and another the 2015 Aldi J.M. Hagenaars Memorial Award. 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.  And her 2006 paper was awarded two ASA Section Outstanding Graduate Student Paper Awards (Sociology of the Family and Sociology of Sex and Gender). She was elected to the Sociological Research Association  in 2023.

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