Phyllis Moen

Phyllis Moen (pronounced Mow-in), Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota and at Cornell University, is a McKnight Endowed Presidential Chair and was Professor of Sociology at the University of Minnesota.

Professor Moen studies the human meanings of social change in the form of transformations in work as they transform gendered life courses. This includes the effects of both organizational interventions and macro-level historical forces, such as the aging of the workforce and COVID-19, as they exacerbate or mitigate intersectional inequalities (by race, gender, and class) in work, stress, and health at all life stages.

With Erin Kelly (MIT) and the Work, Family and Health Network, she investigated organizational work-time policies and practices, employee time strains, psychological and physical health outcomes; this resulted in an award-winning book, Kelly and Moen, Kelly, 2020 (2021 paperback). Overload: How good jobs went bad and what we can do about it. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kelly and Moen chart the effects of an organizational-level innovation aimed at increasing supervisor support and employee control over where and when they work.

Other recent award-winning books including The Career Mystique: Cracks in the American Dream (2005, with Patricia Roehling) and Encore Adulthood: Boomers on the Edge of Risk, Renewal, and Purpose (2016). 

Dr. Moen has served as president of the interdisciplinary and international Work and Family Researchers' Network (WFRN), President of the Eastern Sociological Society, and Director of the Life Course Center, an Interdisciplinary NIA-Funded Center on the Demography and Economics of Aging at the University of Minnesota.  She has received numerous awards, most recently the John Bynner Award for Distinguished Scholarship from the Society for Longitudinal and Life Course Studies; the Lifetime Achievement 2020 Award from the Work and Family Research Network; and the Leonard I. Pearlin Award for Distinguished Contributions to the Sociological Study of Mental Health 2020, Section on Mental Health from the American Sociological Association. 

She is currently investigating the effects of two policy innovations - remote work (with Wen Fan) and the four-day work week (with Juliet Schor and Wen Fan), as well as labor market, time use, and health impacts of COVID-19.