Philip N. Cohen

Philip N. Cohen is an American sociologist. He is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is co-editor, with Syed Ali, of Contexts, the quarterly magazine of the American Sociological Association, and director of SocArXiv, an open archive of the social sciences.

Cohen graduated from the University of Michigan with a B.A. in American Culture, from the University of Massachusetts with an M.A. in Sociology, and from the University of Maryland with a Ph.D. in Sociology. His previous faculty positions were at the University of North Carolina and the University of California, Irvine

He is a sociologist and demographer who works in the areas of families and inequality, social demography, and social inequality. His concerns include gender and race/ethnic segregation in occupations, gender and authority, unpaid housework and care work, health disparities, and demographic measurement.

He also is an Associate of the Maryland Population Research Center, a member of the Board of Directors of the Council on Contemporary Families, and secretary-treasurer of the American Sociological Association's Population Section.

Cohen wrote The Family: Diversity, Inequality, and Social Change, published in 2014 by W. W. Norton & Company.

Cohen's work on labor market inequality has focused on race/ethnic and gender inequality in the United States. On race, he has published in the American Journal of Sociology (with Matt Huffman) and Social Forces, assessing the relationship between demographic composition of labor markets and patterns of inequality.

In the area of gender inequality, his research (with Matt Huffman) has addressed occupational segregation and gender devaluation and the effects of women in workplace management positions. Alone as well as with a number of different co-authors, he has published research on the gender division of household labor.

On family structure, he has addressed issues of measurement, including how to identify cohabiting couples in U.S. Census data., and the language used for marriage (homogamy and heterogamy).

On health disparities, he has studied disability rates among adopted children, the living arrangements of children with disabilities, the relationship between parental age and childhood disability, and race/ethnic disparities in infant mortality.

Some of Cohen's research is part of the tradition of intersectionality, including his work on the American women's suffrage movement; and on the relationship between population composition and inequality by race, class and gender.

In 2007, Cohen testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, on equal pay for women workers. The legislation under consideration at that hearing eventually became the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009.

Cohen has been the author of the Family Inequality blog since 2009.

His writing has appeared in the New York Times Sunday Review, the Washington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Sociological Images, The Atlantic, Boston Review, Huffington Post, Time, Pacific Standard, LSE Impact Blog, The Conversation, and Salon.

He has also contributed to news reports for such sources as the New York Times, Time magazine, NPR, the Washington Post, MSNBC and Vox.com.

In 2011 he served as a consultant to the United States Census Bureau for its release of the first enumeration of same-sex married couples from the 2010 decennial census.