Karen Oppenheim Mason | |
---|---|
Citizenship | United States |
Education | B.A. Reed College; Ph.D. University of Chicago |
Employer | World Bank |
Known for | Bringing gender theory into demography |
Title | President of the Population Association of America |
Term | 1997 |
Karen Oppenheim Mason was an American sociologist and demographer. She served as president of the Population Association of America in 1997 [1] [2] and was best known for her research on the relationship between changes in fertility patterns and social changes in gender roles. [3] [4] [5]
Mason grew up in a poor family in New York and attended Reed College on a scholarship, majoring in Sociology. [2] Mason earned her Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Chicago in 1968. She became a demographer while working in her first faculty position in the Department of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin. [2]
After teaching at the University of Wisconsin for three years, Mason took a job at the Research Triangle Institute doing research on women's labor force participation in the Research Triangle area of North Carolina. [2] In 1973, Mason moved to the University of Michigan, where she became a Professor of Sociology and Associate Director of the Population Studies Center. She taught graduate courses on gender and undergraduate courses on the family. [2] In 1980, Mason held a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. [6]
Through her research, Mason applied quantitative analysis to gender theory and gender theory to demography. [2] In the second half of the twentieth century, birth rates were a central concern of demographers, who uncritically attributed fertility to women. [7] Mason was among the first demographers to use gender theory to explain fertility trends, and to recognize the relationship between gender dynamics and fertility rates. [3] [4] [5] Mason served as President of the Population Association of America in 1997. [1] [2] She devoted her presidential address to improving demographic understandings of fertility transition (long-term declines in average family size) by taking a perceptual, interactive approach. [8]
Mason left the University of Michigan in 1991, first becoming Director of the Population Studies Program at the University of Hawai'i and of the Program on Population at the East-West Center, and then becoming Director of the Gender and Development Program at the World Bank in Washington, DC. She retired from this position in 2004. [2]
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