13th Annual De Jong Lecture in Social Demography

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The impact of workplace policies/practices and family composition: Can they explain inequalities in health?

Lisa Berkman, Ph.D., Director of the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, and the Thomas D. Cabot Professor of Public Policy, Epidemiology, and Global Health and Population, Harvard University

Dr. Berkman will explore the interface between work and family, focusing on workplace policies and practices and their impact on health. She will discuss impacts ranging from job security or precarity, to the impact of single motherhood on long run health, to that of family leave policies.

Discussants:

Christine Percheski, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Sociology, Northwestern University. Dr. Percheski uses demographic and other quantitative methods to study how recent and ongoing changes in family life are related to changing patterns of social inequality in the United States.

Sarah Damaske, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Labor & Employment Relations, Sociology, and Women’s Studies, Penn State. Dr. Damaske’s research focuses on how work and family transitions lead to cumulating inequalities over the life course. She is the author of For the family? How class and gender shape women’s work winner of the 2011 National Women’s Studies Association Sara Whaley Prize for best book on women and labor.

Agenda:

8:45 Check-in; Coffee available in Boardroom I

9:00 Lisa Berkman, Ph.D.

10:10 Christine Percheski, Ph.D.

10:35 Sarah Damaske, Ph.D.

11:00 Open discussion

11:45-12:30 Reception for all attendees in Boardroom II

Lecture Sponsors:

The De Jong Lecture in Social Demography is supported by the Gordon F. and Caroline M. De Jong Lectureship in Social Demography Endowment, administered jointly and supplemented by the Department of Sociology and Criminology and by the Population Research Institute at Penn State.

View Previous De Jong Lectures

Gordon F. De Jong is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Demography, former Director of the Graduate Program in Demography, and Senior Scientist Emeritus with the Population Research Institute at Penn State. Caroline M. De Jong, a former middle school teacher, has been involved in numerous community, church, and university-related organizations including the American Association of University Women, Stay-and-Play Nursery School, Presbyterian Women, and the Centre County Board of Elections.