Faculty Fellows' Lunch Featuring Marianne Cooper

Marianne Cooper: ""Women Just Worry More": Class and the Gendered Division of Worry Work."

Families today are under intense economic pressure.  This talk, drawn from research with fifty families from rich to poor in Silicon Valley, investigates how class and gender come together to shape who in the family is on call to be a family’s security guard – the person who takes on the responsibility of worrying about money and security in the first place. While families themselves point to personality traits to explain who ended up being a family’s security guard, cross class analysis reveals that there are gendered and classed dimensions to worry work.  Such social patterns reflect families’ different positions in relation to large-scale economic transformations. 

Marianne Cooper is a sociologist at the Clayman Institute.