Suzanne M. Bianchi is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center on Population, Gender, and Social Inequality at the University of Maryland. She is also an Affiliate Faculty member of the Women’s Studies Department and the School of Public Affairs. Prior to her current position, she served as Assistant Chief for Social and Demographic Statistics in the Population Division of the U.S. Bureau of the Census.

In addition to being a Past President of the Population Association of America (PAA), she is also a member of the American Sociological Association (ASA) and the National Council on Family Relations (NCFR). She has chaired the ASA Family Section (1997-98) and the ASA Population Section (1993-94), served as guest editor for a special volume of Demography on “Men in Families,” and is serving as a member of the Committee on Family Work Policies of the National Academy of Sciences.

Bianchi’s research focuses on women’s and children’s economic wellbeing and changing patterns of work and family life. Her research on the relationship between women’s increased economic independence and marital disruption (with Liana Sayer) won the National Council on Family Relation’s Rueben Hill Award for the best paper published on the family in 2000. In 1999, her paper with Philip Cohen on “Marriage, Children, and Women’s Employment: What Do We Know?” won the Lawrence Klein Award for the best contribution to the Monthly Labor Review in that year. Bianchi, with Lynn Casper, recently published Change and Continuity in the American Family (2002, Sage Publications). She has published in major journals and is co-authoring two forthcoming books (see list of publications at end of article).