Funding

Biography

Kathleen Christensen directs the Program on The Workplace, Workforce and Working Families at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in New York City. Prior to Sloan, she was a Professor of Psychology at the Graduate School and University Center of City University of New York and before that served as a policy analyst at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C.

Dr. Christensen has published extensively on the changing nature of work and its relationship to the family. Her books include Contingent Work: American Employment Relations in Transition (Cornell University Press, 1998); Turbulence in the American Workplace (Oxford University Press, 1991); Women and Home-based Work: The Unspoken Contract (Henry Holt, 1988) and  The New Era of Home-based Work: Directions and Policies (Westview Press, 1988). Her editorials have appeared on the national Op Ed pages of the Washington Post, USA Today, Chicago Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer and Atlanta Constitution.

Dr. Christensen has served as a consultant to American businesses interested in rethinking their staffing and scheduling arrangements for employees and regularly serves as an advisor to federal and state committees on work-family issues. She has also served on a number of national work-family advisory boards.

She received her BS, summa cum laude, from the University of Wisconsin and her doctorate from the Pennsylvania State University, where she was a Danforth Fellow, as well as a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow. She has also been a Mellon Fellow and Rockefeller Fellow at the Aspen Institute for the Humanities.