Sarah Damaske is an author and scholar of unemployment, work-family, and gender. She is an associate professor of sociology and labor and employment relations at Pennsylvania State University, where she serves as the Associate Director of the Population Research Institute. She is also the Vice President of the Work Family Researchers Network (WFRN). Dr. Damaske is the author of three books, including The Tolls of Uncertainty: How Privilege and the Guilt Gap Shape Unemployment in America published by Princeton University Press in May 2021. The Tolls of Uncertainty paints an intimate portrait of the American unemployment system and the ways unemployment shapes families, finances, health, and the job hunt.
An internationally known expert on employment and inequality, Dr. Damaske’s books also include The Science and Art of Interviewing (Oxford, 2020, co-authored with Kathleen Gerson) and For the Family: How Class and Gender Shape Women’s Work (Oxford 2011), which was named one of the “most influential books published on the family since 2000” by Contemporary Sociology.
Dr. Damaske is a frequent invited guest speaker, panelist, and keynote speaker at international conferences, universities, and events. Dr. Damaske’s research is regularly cited in the media, including multiple stories in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and NPR, as well as featured stories in the Wall Street Journal, ABC Nightly News, and the BBC. She also writes for mainstream audiences with pieces in Harvard Business Review, Psychology Today, and the Gender & Society blog. Recently, she has published on the relationship between men’s earnings over their lives and their health at middle-age, how work and family experiences shape women’s experience of stress, on women’s work trajectories, and on how class and gender shape job searches during unemployment in The American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Demography, and Gender & Society. Support for her research has been provided by organizations including the National Science Foundation, the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development at the National Institutes of Health, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the American Sociological Association, and the Work-Family Research Network.