About the Researcher

I am a Professor of Sociology at Carleton University in Ottawa, the capital city of Canada. I am a mother of three teenage girls (including twins) and I have shared their care with my husband who is a naturopathic doctor. For most of the past twenty years, I have been the primary breadwinner in my family. My husband and I both grew up in households where our mothers were primary caregivers and our fathers the sole family breadwinners. I have found it fascinating to observe how successive generations juggle and negotiate the constancy and change provided by these roles, activities and identities.

I have been researching and writing about changing mothering and fathering for nearly twenty years. I wrote my PhD thesis at Cambridge University on shared caregiving couples in Britain in the early 1990s and I authored a book on Canadian primary caregiving dads entitled Do Men Mother? (2006). It clearly touched on a 'hot topic' as it received a great deal of Canadian and international media attention while also garnering a Canadian academic book prize. The book was featured in magazines (e.g. Macleans, Reader’s Digest, Chatelaine, Today’s Parent), in newspapers (e.g. Canada’s National Post and the Washington Post), while I did dozens of interviews on local and national radio and on television talk shows.

When I finished writing Do Men Mother? I felt that I had only told one side of the story. While I did feature mothers’ perspectives in that book, I knew that there was so much more to explore. Specifically, I wanted to investigate the everyday experiences of female breadwinners as well as the policy, community, and relational supports that help or hinder these women. With the generous support of the Therese Casgrain Fellowship (awarded biannually from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for a project dedicated to women and social justice issues), I launched this research project. This online forum is part of that research endeavor. It aims to hear some of women's perspectives and concerns about the interface between mothing and breadwinning.

Who is working with me on this research project:

Karen Foster will be moderating the discussion board. She is a PhD student in Sociology at Carleton University, currently in her second year of study. Her own research explores variations in how different provincial governments in Canada deal with young people in their policies and initiatives, and how social scientific research helps to shape these government tools. She is also the founding editor of New Social Inquiry, an online, open-access, public-academic journal for the study of social issues. She lives in Ottawa with her husband, Brian.