The 2009 De Jong Lecture in Social Demography

Gender and the Reallocation of Time Later in Life

Suzanne M. Bianchi (Ph.D., Sociology) is Professor of Sociology and Dorothy Meier Chair in Social Equity at UCLA. Formerly, she was Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology at the University of Maryland where she was the first Director of the Maryland Population Research Center. She is a past President of the Population Association of America and a former editor of the journal Demography. She has also served as chair of the Family Section and the Population Section of the American Sociological Association and she has chaired the PSID Board of Overseers.

Bianchi's research focuses on the American family, time use and gender equality. Her work chronicles changing parental investments in childrearing, unpaid work in the home and market work over the 1965-2000 period, showing that as mother's labor force participation rose, time in housework declined but time in childcare did not. Men's time in the home also rose over this period. She is currently investigating women's reallocation of time later in life as children age and leave the parental home.

Bianchi has also written extensively on family change, including changing family living arrangements, intergenerational caregiving and gender differences in cross-household, cross-generation exchanges of time and money. Recent work shows that gender differences in helping kin are muted at older ages, but gender specialization persists with men providing more instrumental support and women providing more emotional support to elderly parents and adult children.

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