MPRC Founding Director Suzanne Bianchi Passes Away at 61

Suzanne Bianchi, Professor of Sociology and founding Director of the Maryland Population Research Center, passed away on November 4, 2013 at the age of 61. She was a cherished colleague whom we miss deeply.

Dr. Bianchi was best known for her use of time use surveys to study changing parental and family dynamics. Dr. Bianchi’s work questioned conventional wisdom that mothers’ work outside the home had a detrimental effect on their children. Her research showed that despite working longer hours outside the home, working mothers of the 1990s sacrificed other pursuits and managed to spend roughly the same amount of quality time with their children as stay-at-home mothers in the 1960s.

Bianchi worked for many years at the Census Bureau before joining the Department of Sociology at Maryland in 1994. In 2009 she retired from Maryland and became Dorothy L. Meier Chair in Social Equities at UCLA. She died at her home in California of pancreatic cancer, and leaves behind her husband, three children, and a large extended family.

Obituaries noting her many accomplishments were published in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and other newspapers, and her student and colleague Philip Cohen posted a memorial on his blog, Family Inequality.

See the New York Times obituary

See the Los Angeles Times obituary

See Philip Cohen's memorial post on the Family Inequality blog