Former Program Director, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation

Kathleen E. Christensen began working with SCL in May 2020 after a twenty-five-year tenure as Director of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s Working Longer program.

The program was designed to deepen scholarly and public understanding of aging Americans’ work patterns. In 1994 she founded the Foundation’s Workplace, Workforce and Working Families program which she directed until 2010. All blogs reflect her personal opinion.

Under her leadership, the Workplace Workforce and Working Families program played a vital role in developing work-family scholarship and in supporting effective workplaces that meet the needs of working parents and older workers. To that end, in 2003, the Foundation launched the National Initiative on Workplace Flexibility, a collaborative effort designed to make workplace flexibility a standard of the American workplace

Prior to joining the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Dr. Christensen was a Professor of Psychology at the Graduate School and University Center of City University of New York, before that she served as a policy analyst at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C.

Dr. Christensen has published extensively on the changing nature of work and its relationship to the family. Her books include Workplace Flexibility: Realigning 20th Century Jobs for a 21st Century Workforce (Cornell University Press, 2010); Contingent Work: American Employment Relations in Transition (Cornell University Press, 1998); Turbulence in the American Workplace (Oxford University Press, 1991); Women and Home-based Work: The Unspoken Contract (Henry Holt, 1988) and The New Era of Home-based Work: Directions and Policies (Westview Press, 1988). Her editorials have appeared on the national Op Ed pages of the Washington Post, USA Today, Chicago Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer and Atlanta Constitution.

Dr. Christensen is a member of the Conference Board’s Work-Life Leadership Council and has served on a number of national work-life advisory boards. Currently, Dr. Christensen is a Faculty Fellow at Boston College, where she is the co-founder and co-director of Work Equity.

She received her doctorate from the Pennsylvania State University, where she was a Danforth Fellow, as well as a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow. She has also been a Mellon Fellow and Rockefeller Fellow at the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies. In 2004, she was awarded the Work-Life Legacy Award by the Families and Work Institute for her role in founding the field of work-life.