Pilar Gonalons-Pons, GSWS Core Faculty, Wins Award from the American Sociological Association

Pilar Gonalons-Pons, the Alber-Klingelhofer Presidential Associate Professor of Sociology in the School of Arts & Sciences, has won the Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility Section’s Devah Pager Outstanding Article Award at the American Sociological Association annual meeting. 

Dr. Gonalons-Pons received the award for her article “Care Labor and Family Income Inequality: How Childcare Costs Exacerbate Inequality Among U.S. Families.” This study demonstrates how market-priced childcare systems widen family income inequality in the United States. Using data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) and state-level childcare costs, she shows that high childcare prices reduce post-birth earnings for mothers without college degrees much more than for mothers with college degrees. These losses are not offset by partners’ earnings or by income transfers. As a result, childcare costs exacerbate family income gaps between partnered women with and without a college degree by 34 percentage points.

The Devah Pager Outstanding Article Award recognizes innovative and impactful scholarship that advances scientific understanding of inequality, poverty, and mobility. Dr. Gonalons-Pons is affiliated with Penn’s Population Studies Center, program in gender, sexuality and women’s studies, and Leonard Davis Institute for Health Economics. She was a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation and received a PhD in sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a postdoc at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.