Professor of Sociology and Women’s and Gender Studies Andrea Doucet has been renewed as Canada Research Chair in Gender, Work and Care.

On Nov. 13, federal Minister of Science and Sport Kirsty Duncan announced new and renewed Canada Research Chairs in addition to increased funding and more Chairs for the program.

As Canada Research Chair in Gender, Work and Care, Doucet addresses the challenges faced by modern families, including systemic gender and intersectional inequalities in domestic care work and paid work as well as social policies and community supports for families.

Doucet was first named Chair in 2011. Major accomplishments since she received the designation include:

• co-hosting and presenting at this year’s 15th annual International Seminar of the Network of Leave Policies and Research, held July 13 and July 14
• research (with Lindsey McKay and Sophie Mathieu) on social class inequalities in access to maternal or parental leave under the federal Employment Insurance and Quebec Parental Insurance Plan programs
• co-organizing Canada’s Annual Qualitative Analysis Conference in 2016
• co-organizing (with Robyn Lee, Alana Cattapan and Lindsey McKay) the “Consuming Intimacies: Bodies, Labour, Care and Social Justice” symposium in 2015
• recipient of two SSHRC Connection Grants and a SSHRC Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) in 2015 for her research program, “Making/re-making Canadian families: a visual, narrative, and longitudinal study of family practices and family photographs”
• supervisor/mentor of six postdoctoral fellows, including two SSHRC-Banting Fellows and a SSHRC Fellow
• testifying to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Finance on Bill C-86 (with a focus on parental leave benefits) and to the Status of Women Committee on women’s economic security  
• producing a recent research report with a team from the Fort Erie Native Friendship Centre and Brock University on Indigenous unemployment in Niagara
• co-Founder and Faculty Steering Committee member of Brock’s Social Justice Research Institute
• contributing to scholarship on feminist epistemologies and methodologies, ecological thinking, research ethics, narrative analysis and genealogies of concepts

Doucet came to Brock in 2011 from Carleton University, where she was a professor of Sociology. She wrote the award-winning book Do Men Mother? (2006; second edition, 2018).

Through the Canada Research Chairs program, the Government of Canada funds post-secondary research by some of the top experts across engineering, natural sciences, health sciences, humanities and social sciences.

This year, Duncan announced that the program will invest more than $156 million for 187 new and renewed Canada Research Chairs at 49 institutions across Canada.  

Currently, Brock University has eight Canada Research Chairs, with more to be announced.