<div class="field">Expertise Gender and Work Social Stratification Poverty &amp; Social Policy Family Social Demography</div> <div class="field"><p>I am interested in poverty and social policy, gender and work, and the relationship between the two. In recent work, I am concerned with how women’s social interactions guide their economic outcomes. This question is central to my 2013 book,&nbsp; <em>Ain't No Trust: How Bosses, Boyfriends, and Bureaucrats Fail Low-Income Mothers and Why It Matters</em>&nbsp;(University of California Press).&nbsp;</p> <p>The book provides a qualitative comparison of low-income mothers’ experiences with welfare and low-wage work before and after welfare reform and investigates women’s social interactions with caseworkers, employers, child care providers, romantic partners, and networks of family and friends. &nbsp;I argue that these social interactions produce distrust creating barriers to the very actions reform hoped to promote.&nbsp; Policies that do not address the structural factors that shape these interactions and produce distrust -- particularly the fact that low-income mothers' interests are often at odds with their interaction partners -- will be limited in their ability to truly improve the lives of low-income women&nbsp;and their children.</p> <p>To learn more about this research, watch my appearance on MSNBC's <a href="https://www.msnbc.com:443/melissa-harris-perry/watch/changing-the-way-w…; class="ext">Melissa Harris-Perry show</a>; or read my essay in&nbsp;<a href="http://www.bostonreview.net/us/trusting-poor&quot; class="ext">Boston Review</a>; or read coverage of the book in&nbsp;<a href="https://psmag.com/social-justice/women-distrustful-low-income-73001&quot; class="ext">Pacific Standard</a>; or see the&nbsp;NBC <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/us-news/distrust-really-yet-another-for…; class="ext">News interview</a>&nbsp;on the book; or listen to&nbsp;a <a href="http://www.irp.wisc.edu/publications/media/podcasts/LevinePodcastJan201…; class="ext">podcast</a>&nbsp;about the book put out by the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; or to an interview with&nbsp;<a href="https://whyy.org/cms/radiotimes/2014/02/25/breaking-the-cycle-of-povert…; class="ext">WHYY's Radio</a> Times hosted by Marty Moss-Coane.</p> <p>In other work, I have studied how informal social interactions between co-workers reinforce formal institutional barriers to sex integration in job titles in a manufacturing plant. I have also investigated the causal links between adolescent motherhood and children’s subsequent outcomes and the relationship between mothers’ and fathers’ occupational traits and children’s occupational aspirations.</p></div>