Collins studies gender inequality in the workplace and in family life. Her research examines how culture and policy intersect to reduce and reproduce inequality. She aims to advance the rights and status of women, and to secure federal work-family policy supports for U.S. families like paid parental leave and affordable childcare that are the norm in peer nations.
Her first book is Making Motherhood Work: How Women Manage Careers and Caregiving, published 2019 with Princeton University Press. She conducted interviews with 135 working mothers in Sweden, Germany, Italy, and the United States over five years. These four countries offer distinct policy approaches to reconciling work-family conflict. She examined how different ideals of gender, motherhood, and employment are embedded in these policies, and how they shape the daily lives of working mothers in these countries. Collins shows that mothers’ struggles are not inevitable and they can’t be resolved by individual efforts at “balance.” Instead, she argues that parents everywhere need work-family justice: a system in which women and men have the opportunity and power to participate fully in paid work and family life. Her research is supported by the National Science Foundation, American Association of University Women, and German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). Outside academia, she has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Harvard Business Review, and Slate, and consulted for companies such as Pepsi and The New York Times on women’s rights.
