Cynthia Fuchs Epstein

Education At Columbia University, Fuchs Epstein received a grant of $1,000 from the Institute of Life Insurance to study the American family.

For her first study after completing her graduate education, she studied Black female professionals whom she interviewed about the various factors that made it possible for them to achieve their positions despite the discrimination they faced for their gender and skin color. She conducted research that focused on gender- and race-based segregation at AT&T.

Fuchs Epstein's first book was published in 1971 and was titled Women's Place: Option and Limits on Professional Careers.

Fuchs Epstein was invited to meet with Hirsh Cohen, vice-president of the Alfred Sloan Foundation, in 1994. She conducted research that discovered that less than three percent of lawyers chose to work part-time, because this caused others to perceive them as less committed to their professional life and resulted in them not being given meaningful work. This research informed her next book, titled The Part-time Paradox: Time Norms, Professional Life, Family and Gender, published in 1999.

She published a paper in 2004 titled "Border Crossings: The Constraints of Time Norms in Transgressions of Gender and Professional Roles". It looks at the ways in which ideologies of time and gender restrict social change.

Fuchs Epstein has been Distinguished Professor Emerita of sociology at the City University of New York Graduate Center since 1990. She is a past president of the American Sociological Association (ASA). visiting professor at the Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and visiting fellow at the Stanford Law School. She was chair of the ASA Occupations and Organizations, Culture, and Sex and Gender Sections and 1984 president of the Eastern Sociological Society.

Awards In 1982, Fuchs Epstein received the Merit Award from the American Bar Association and the Scribes Book Award for Women in Law. Fuchs Epstein has received are the 2004 Eastern Sociological Society Merit Award, the 2003 ASA Jessie Bernard Award, and the 1994 ASA Section on the Sociology of Sex and Gender's Distinguished Article Award.

Selected publications The Part-time Paradox: Time Norms, Professional Life, Family and Gender. New York: Routledge, 1999. Deceptive Distinctions: Sex, Gender, and the Social Order. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990. Women in Law. New York: Basic Books, 1980. Women's Place: Options and Limits in Professional Careers. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970.