My dissertation, entitled Women Without Children: Cultural Perspectives on A Demographic Phenomenon, draws on over 150 in-depth interviews that I collected between 2020 and 2022 with women in the United States and Japan. Instead of choosing participants based on one primary reason for remaining childless, I interviewed a range of women, from those who saw themselves as childfree to those who were still hoping for children or undergoing fertility treatments. Many participants had complex pathways to childlessness, which prompted several questions that my dissertation engages with. These include: 1) How is childlessness complicated by how culturally durable motherhood is? This is an especially relevant question in the United States, which currently has a lower childless rate than many other wealthy, postindustrial countries. 2) How might qualitative data be leveraged to model childlessness as its own unique, life-spanning process? 3) How does broader cultural context shape what it means to be childless?

Spanning three empirical chapters and drawing on rich interview quotes from American and Japanese women, I use cultural, gender, and demographic lenses to better understand a phenomenon - childlessness - that is becoming increasingly diverse and prevalent in most societies today. In the near future, I plan to develop this project into a book.

The COVID-19 pandemic struck right before I began conducing my dissertation interviews, providing me with an opportunity to examine how this unprecedented crisis mattered for women who had not (yet) had children when the pandemic began. In a paper recently published in Population and Development Review, I draw on interview data with women ages 35-50 who discussed with me how the pandemic had impacted their sense-making of their non-motherhood.

I argue that the pandemic produced a shared sense of “gendered uncertainty” by exacerbating both preexisting worries about motherhood and unease about the future. As the data further reveal, the pandemic was therefore conceived of by many childless women as a good time to not have children, particularly in light of the United States’ weak infrastructure of family support. These findings contribute to existing theoretical frameworks of fertility change by foregrounding women's subjective evaluations of their reproductive options during a time of upheaval and introducing the important role of gendered uncertainty in shaping reproductive sense-making. Findings also contribute to the literature on childlessness by demonstrating how childlessness can gain newfound appeal as a family status during turbulent times.

In a paper published in Sociological Forum, I ask if and how anticipations of work–family conflict emerge in aspiring professional women’s career decision-making processes before they enter the labor market and further, how these anticipations shape career-relevant decisions. Using interview data with 43 women students at two universities in MBA, JD, and PhD programs as a case study of aspiring professional women, I find that students in graduate programs feel channeled toward “prescribed pathways,” or normalized, high-status career paths. At the same time, women students come to view these pathways as the most susceptible to work–family conflict while they frame other, less institutionally normalized pathways as more suitable for balancing with family life. Using data on interviewees’ real job decisions, I then outline three distinct ways in which women’s views regarding future work–family conflict translate into career choices, arguing that seemingly gender-neutral professionalization contexts such as graduate school impact how women come to view certain career paths as more or less family-friendly and relatedly, their subsequent short and long-term career-relevant decisions.