Joya Misra's research explores how policies can both mediate and reinforce inequalities by class, gender and race/ethnicity. Her early research focused on welfare state policies from a historical perspective, explaining their creation and how gender, class and race/ethnicity have shaped the kinds of policies that emerged. More recently, she has more explicitly linked the policies themselves to various outcomes, trying to understand the effects of family policies for different populations (primarily by class and gender). Professor Misra is currently working with Michelle Budig and Irene Boeckmann on a series of papers, funded by the National Science Foundation, that use multilevel modeling to examine how work-family policies help shape outcomes such as wages, employment and poverty among women and mothers. Misra and Budig's Luxembourg Income Study Working Paper “How Care Work Shapes Earnings in a Cross-National Perspective” was recently chosen as the winner of the first World Bank/LIS Gender Research Award. Other recent work examines how, through policies, immigrant women workers are drawn to wealthier countries to meet increasing care needs.  This project demonstrates how neoliberal welfare state restructuring and immigration policy have created greater inequalities through reinforcing the globalization of care. Joya currently serves as Chair of the Race, Sex and Class section of the American Sociological Association.

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Curriculum Vitae
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Current Grants:
2009-10. Andrew Mellon Foundation. M3 Team Grant: CSBS & CPPA Administration Grants Workshop

2009-10. NSF. Doctoral Dissertation Research: Child Custody and Judicial Constructions of Parenthood. Co-PI: Kristy Thomas.

2008-10. NSF. Family Policies and the Wage Penalty: A Cross-National and Multi-Level Approach. PI: Michelle Budig.

2009. CSBS Small Grant Program for Instructional Improvement.
Teaching Writing in Substantive Sociological Courses: Best Practices

2008-09. Provost's Office. Joint MSP-UMass Administration Work-Life Project. With Jennifer Lundquist.

Recent Grants:
2008. United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD). Wage Penalties Associated with Working in the Care Sector: A Cross-National Analysis. With Michelle Budig.

2006-08. NSF. The Cross-National Effects of Work-Family Policies. NSF. Co-PI: Michelle Budig.

2000-06. American Sociological Association. Editorship of the Rose Series in Sociology (with Robert Zussman, Naomi Gerstel, Douglas Anderton, Dan Clawson, and Randall Stokes, eds.).

Pending Grants:
Defining the "Good Parent": Gender and Sexual Orientation in U.S. Child Custody Decisions, 1996-2008. American Psychological Foundation. Co-PI: Kristy Thomas.

Recent Publications:
"The Effect of Family Policy on Women's Employment Rates: Historical Evidence from France and the Netherlands." In Method and Substance in Macro-Comparative Analysis, Lane Kenworthy and Alexander Hicks. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2008.

"Work-Family Policies and Poverty for Partnered and Single Women in Europe and North America." Gender and Society 21: 804-27, 2007.
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"Neoliberalism, Globalization, and the International Division of Care." In Wages of Empire: Women's Poverty, Globalization, and State Transformations, Amalia Cabezas, Ellen Reese and Marguerite Waller (pp. 113-26). Boulder: Paradigm Press, 2007.

"Reconciliation Policies and the Effects of Motherhood on Employment, Earnings, and Poverty." Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis 9(2): 135-55, 2007.

Public Sociology: Fifteen Eminent Sociologists Debate Politics and the Profession in the Twenty-First Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.  With Dan Clawson, Robert Zussman, Naomi Gerstel, Randall Stokes, Douglas Anderton and Michael Burawoy (co-editors).

"The Globalization of Carework: Immigration, Economic Restructuring, and the World System." Globalization 3(3): 317-32, 2006.