The Kathleen Christensen Dissertation Award
This award recognizes a recent graduate of a doctoral program who has already made a significant contribution to the work and family knowledge base. The Kathleen Christensen Dissertation Award has been created to encourage doctoral candidates and early career scholars to reach for/achieve high and rigorous standards of research relevant to the work and family area of study. It provides financial support to help a promising work-family scholar to initiate post-dissertation research. This award is co-sponsored and co-selected by the Work and Family Researchers Network and the Society for Human Resource Management. This award is made possible by generous support from the Northrop Grumman Corporation, the Families and Work Institute, the SHRM Foundation, SHRM’s National Study of the Changing Workforce, and the Work and Family Researchers Network members.
Honoring Kathleen Christensen
Kathleen Christensen directs the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s Working Longer program. Dr. Christensen currently serves as co-President of WFRN. Previously, Christensen established and spearheaded the Sloan Foundation’s Workplace, Work Force and Working Families program. Under her leadership, the foundation has been credited as a driving force in creating the field of work-family research and with launching a national movement to make workplace flexibility a compelling national issue and the standard of the American workplace. Dr. Christensen planned and participated in the 2010 White House Forum on Workplace Flexibility, as well as the 2014 White House Summit on Working Families.
In 2010, Dr. Christensen was named by Working Mother magazine as one of the, “Seven Wonders of the Work-Life Field”. In 2004, she was awarded the inaugural Work-Life Legacy Award by the Families and Work Institute. She is the author or editor of seven books, including some of the earliest research on contingent work and work at home.
Christensen earned her Ph.D. from Pennsylvania State University. She began her professional career as a policy analyst at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C., and later joined the faculty of the Graduate Center, City University of New York, where she was a Professor of Psychology.
2026 Award Recipient: Meiying Li
WFRN is honored to recognize Meiying Li as recipient of the 2026 Kathleen Christensen Dissertation Award. Dr Li’s dissertation A Tale of Two Labor Markets—How Gender Wage Inequalities Associated with Occupational Sex Segregation Vary in High- and Low-Skilled Occupations, United States 1960– 2019 interrogates the link between occupational feminization and the gender gap in wages.
As Professor Jennifer Hook details in her nomination letter, Dr. Li’s research utilizes longitudinal designs to examine inequalities in labor market outcomes as linked to gender, family, class, and race-ethnicity. Her dissertation makes major contributions to work–family research, revealing how valuations of occupations are shaped by gendered family roles and how these relationships change over historical time. Her analyses show that the long-standing wage penalty associated with occupational feminization was strongest during the period when mothers entered paid employment in large numbers, and that this association weakens—and even reverses—in highly skilled occupations as continuous employment across the life course becomes normative for women. The impact of her research is already proving significant, with one chapter published in Social Forces, recognized with the Robert D. Mare Graduate Student Paper Award from the ASA Section on Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility, as well as receiving honorable mention for the Burt Best Student Paper Award from the ASA Section on Economic Sociology. Meiying Li’s dissertation advances work–family research by showing how the valuation of occupations is shaped by gendered family roles, and how changing norms about women’s continuous employment—especially motherhood—transform the long-standing link between occupational feminization and wages.
Meiying Li completed her PhD in Sociology at the University of Southern California and is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy at Cornell University.
2026 Honorable Mention: Manlin Cai
WFRN recognizes Dr. Manlin Cai with Honorable Mention for the 2026 Kathleen Christensen Dissertation Award. Dr. Cai’s dissertation Power and Status in Public and Private Spheres: Gender, Workplace Authority, and Family Dynamics in China,” focuses on how workplace authority interconnects with family dynamics to shape and reshape gender inequalities.
As Professor Yue Qian details in her nomination letter, Dr Cai’s dissertation represents an exceptional scholarly contribution to the work and family knowledge base. It examines (1) how gender, parenthood, and employment sector work together to shape individuals’ access to and scope of workplace authority; (2) how individuals’ and their spouses’ workplace authority influences the gender division of housework among Chinese couples; and (3) how individuals’ and their spouses’ workplace authority is associated with subjective well-being, with a particular focus on variations by gender and gender ideology.
Dr. Cai’s dissertation reveals how motherhood penalties exist in the private sector but not in the state sector, whereas a fatherhood premium exists in the state sector but not in the private sector, a critical insight into how gender/parental norms, unequal divisions of childcare, and institutional contexts in China reproduce and widen the gender leadership gaps. She also shows that women’s access to workplace authority not only matters for power dynamics at work but also how they extend to couple negotiations at home, shaping distributions of housework responsibilities. By examining indicators of happiness, Dr. Cai illuminates the liberating potentials gained embracing gender egalitarianism. The importance of her research has been recognized by the Canadian Population Society and the Canadian Sociological Association.
Dr. Manlin Cai completed her PhD in Sociology at the University of British Columbia.