Patricia McManus
Patricia McManus is an assistant professor of sociology at IU who studies social mobility in the United States and Germany. She is especially interested in how cross-national differences in national labor markets, marriage and family institutions, and the welfare state produce different sets of opportunities for individuals and families. In a project on career mobility and labor markets, she asked whether self-employment jobs are "good" jobs, what makes for differences in the quality of self-employment jobs across nations, and why do men and women in self-employment have such different jobs? Her work on income mobility (with Tom DiPrete) asks why welfare states differ in their social stratification regime, and to what extent can individuals preserve the material gains and overcome the material losses produced by job and family change? Once active on the Board of Directors of a local child-care institution, she has now redirected that community service time towards many elementary-school homework projects. In her free time she tries to run away from it all --- her goal is to break the 10-minute mile.
