Introduction
Irene Boeckmann is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in 2014. After completing a post-doctoral fellowship at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center in Germany, she joined the faculty at the University of Toronto in 2016. She teaches courses in the area of gender, family, work and inequality, public policy and quantitative methods.
Her current research project examines the gendered processes that shape how different-sex couples organize paid work before and after the transition to parenthood in four different welfare state contexts. Part of this project focusses on couples where the woman has labor market advantages relative to her partner before they have children and asks how these couples engage in employment after the transition to parenthood in different labor market and policy contexts.
She is also engaged in collaborative research projects examining the relationship between fatherhood and earnings. One of these projects investigates how this relationship varies cross-nationally and whether labor market characteristics and public policies can account for some of this variation. A related project examines whether changes in fatherhood ideals, patterns of partnership and family formation and the labor market have changed fathers’ earnings advantages in the U.S. labor market over time.