Biography
Barbara J. Risman is a College of Liberal Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In 2025, she will be a Visiting Fellow at the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg Institute for Advanced Study in Bremen, Germany. She spent the fall of 2023 as a Visiting Fellow at the SciencesPo in Paris. She came to UIC in 2006 to be Head of the Department and remained in that position for a decade. During the 2018 winter term, she was a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Durham University in the U.K. She spent the spring of 2018 as a Visiting Professor at the University of Valencia in Spain, Trento University in Italy, and the VU in Amsterdam. From 2015-2016 she was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. Prior to joining the faculty at UIC, Barbara was Distinguished Research Professor at North Carolina State University.
In 2018, Professor Risman published a new book, Where the Millennials Will Take Us: A New Generation Wrestles with the Gender Structure (Oxford University Press). Using her theory of gender as a social structure, Risman analyzes life history interviews with Chicagoland Millennials. With a sample both gender diverse, and majority minority, this book provides a unique insight into today’s young adults. Gender is definitely being reimagined by some, but not by all. Some in this sample are true believers that men and women are essentially different and should be so. Others are gender innovators, defying stereotypes themselves, and rejecting sexist ideologies and organizational practices. Perhaps new to this generation are the gender rebels who go beyond rejecting sexism, to rejecting sex categories themselves, and often refusing to present their bodies within them, some claiming the new identity of genderqueer instead of man and woman. And finally there are those who are simply confused by all the changes around them. There is no one typical Millennial. These interviews show how dramatically gender still constrains life in America. Professor Risman concludes with a call for a fourth wave of feminism to eradicate not only sexism but also the gender structure itself.
Professor Risman published a second book in 2018, Handbook of the Sociology of Gender (co-edited with Froyum and Scarborough). It is an encyclopedic overview of the newest research on gender from families to labor force to the global south, designed for both classroom use and doctoral preliminary examinations. Barbara J. Risman is the author of Families As They Really Are (co-edited with Virginia Rutter, Norton, 2014). She is also the author of Gender Vertigo: American Families in Transition (Yale, 1998) and over two dozen journal articles in venues including American Sociological Review, Gender & Society, and Journal of Marriage and the Family. She has been editor of the journal Contemporary Sociology. She is Co-Editor Emerita of a book series, The Gender Lens, a feminist transformation project for the discipline of sociology. She has been Co-Chair and Executive Officer of The Council on Contemporary Families, a national organization whose mission is to bring new research findings and clinical expertise to public attention. She is a Past President (2015-2016) of the Southern Sociological Society and has previously served as the Vice-President of the American Sociological Association. Barbara Risman has blogged for Huffington Post and offered her opinions as op-eds on cnn.com and the Chicago Tribune. Risman has a regular column on PsychologyToday.com titled “Gender Matters".
In 2005, Dr. Risman was honored with the Katherine Jocher Belle Boone Award from the Southern Sociological Society for lifetime contributions to the study of gender. She was also named as the 2003 Feminist Lecturer by the Sociologists for Women in Society. In 2011, Dr. Risman was honored with the American Sociological Association’s Award for the Public Understanding of Sociology. Most recently, she was awarded the "100 Women that Mattered" at North Carolina State University. You can view Dr. Risman's vitae here.
In 2018, Professor Risman published a new book, Where the Millennials Will Take Us: A New Generation Wrestles with the Gender Structure (Oxford University Press). Using her theory of gender as a social structure, Risman analyzes life history interviews with Chicagoland Millennials. With a sample both gender diverse, and majority minority, this book provides a unique insight into today’s young adults. Gender is definitely being reimagined by some, but not by all. Some in this sample are true believers that men and women are essentially different and should be so. Others are gender innovators, defying stereotypes themselves, and rejecting sexist ideologies and organizational practices. Perhaps new to this generation are the gender rebels who go beyond rejecting sexism, to rejecting sex categories themselves, and often refusing to present their bodies within them, some claiming the new identity of genderqueer instead of man and woman. And finally there are those who are simply confused by all the changes around them. There is no one typical Millennial. These interviews show how dramatically gender still constrains life in America. Professor Risman concludes with a call for a fourth wave of feminism to eradicate not only sexism but also the gender structure itself.
Professor Risman published a second book in 2018, Handbook of the Sociology of Gender (co-edited with Froyum and Scarborough). It is an encyclopedic overview of the newest research on gender from families to labor force to the global south, designed for both classroom use and doctoral preliminary examinations. Barbara J. Risman is the author of Families As They Really Are (co-edited with Virginia Rutter, Norton, 2014). She is also the author of Gender Vertigo: American Families in Transition (Yale, 1998) and over two dozen journal articles in venues including American Sociological Review, Gender & Society, and Journal of Marriage and the Family. She has been editor of the journal Contemporary Sociology. She is Co-Editor Emerita of a book series, The Gender Lens, a feminist transformation project for the discipline of sociology. She has been Co-Chair and Executive Officer of The Council on Contemporary Families, a national organization whose mission is to bring new research findings and clinical expertise to public attention. She is a Past President (2015-2016) of the Southern Sociological Society and has previously served as the Vice-President of the American Sociological Association. Barbara Risman has blogged for Huffington Post and offered her opinions as op-eds on cnn.com and the Chicago Tribune. Risman has a regular column on PsychologyToday.com titled “Gender Matters".
In 2005, Dr. Risman was honored with the Katherine Jocher Belle Boone Award from the Southern Sociological Society for lifetime contributions to the study of gender. She was also named as the 2003 Feminist Lecturer by the Sociologists for Women in Society. In 2011, Dr. Risman was honored with the American Sociological Association’s Award for the Public Understanding of Sociology. Most recently, she was awarded the "100 Women that Mattered" at North Carolina State University. You can view Dr. Risman's vitae here.
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