Eunsil Oh

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Curriculum Vitae

Biography

Research Interest Statement:

I am a sociologist of gender, work, and family interested in inequality, culture, and demographic change. My research asks how gender inequality persists and changes form as women’s lives transform, and I pursue that question through contemporary South Korea and East Asia. Empirically, I study maternal employment and intensive mothering, workplace overwork and parental leave, gender inequality in labor markets, and the retreat from marriage and childbearing in the lowest-low fertility societies.

Previous and ongoing projects include an interview study of more than one hundred urban Korean mothers on what I call the dual overwork regime, in which escalating demands for devoted hours at work and labor-intensive mothering at home turn work and family into an either-or decision rather than a balancing act; a comparative analysis of highly educated women in East Asia showing that overwork and gender essentialism together produce a tradeoff between full-time employment and a second child; an interview-based study of parental leave in Korea showing that women who take leave feel compelled to outwork their colleagues on return, so that a supportive policy deepens the conflict it was meant to ease within a culture of overwork; and a two-generation life history study of Korean mothers and daughters.

My newer work follows two agendas. The first examines the decentering of motherhood, an orientation I call reproductive pessimism, in which childbearing becomes a conditional and often unappealing prospect rather than an assumed stage of life. Drawing on 175 life history interviews with two generations of Korean women, 135 daughters and 40 of their mothers, including 40 matched mother and daughter dyads, I trace how daughters’ sustained observation of their mothers’ lives and mothers’ own reinterpretation of those lives together accelerate the retreat from marriage and motherhood. The second examines the institutional foundations of maternal overwork, where mothers spend more than fifty hours a week on parenting. Here I focus on a hyper-competitive education system and on the hidden coordination mothers perform when school days, work schedules, and welfare provisions fail to align.

Education:

Ph.D., Sociology, Harvard University (2018)

Departmental Areas of Interest:

Gender; Family; Culture; Education; Social Stratification; Qualitative Methods

CLASSES:

Sociology 904 Gender & Women’s Studies 904 : Feminist Theory and Practice
Sociology 984 Gender & Women’s Studies 720: Training Seminar in Gender Research
Sociology 138: Sociology of Gender
Sociology 496_Fall: Gender, Work, and Family in East Asia
Sociology 496_Spring: Social Change in Contemporary Korea

Other Campus Affiliations:

Center for Demography & Ecology
Center For East Asian Studies

Selected Publications (*indicates work with graduate student):

Oh, Eunsil, Anni Ni*, and Zheng Mu. Forthcoming. “Flexible Motherhood and the Unequal Logics of Women’s Work: Chinese Mothers in Singapore.” Gender & Society 40 (6).

Oh, Eunsil. 2025. “Norms or Knowledge? Unpacking Views on Maternal Employment among the College Educated in South Korea.” Qualitative Sociology 48(2):213–42.       

Park, Soyun* and Eunsil Oh. 2025. “Getting a Foot in the Door: A Meta-Analysis of U.S. Audit Studies of Gender Bias in Hiring.” Sociological Science.         

Han, SangWon and Eunsil Oh. 2024. “Aligned, Competing, and Blurred: Gender and Family Attitudes in East Asia.” Journal of Marriage and Family 87(2):676–700.                           

Oh, Eunsil and Eunmi Mun. 2022. “Compensatory Work Devotion: How a Culture of Overwork Shapes Women’s Parental Leave in South Korea.” Gender & Society 36(4):552–77.

◊ Winner of the 2024 Article of the Year Award, Family Section, American Sociological Association.         

Brinton, Mary C., and Eunsil Oh. 2019. “Babies, Work, or Both? Highly Educated Women’s Employment and Fertility in East Asia.” American Journal of Sociology.

◊ 2020 Finalist, Rosabeth Moss Kanter International Award for Excellence in Work and Family Research (one of five finalists chosen from the authors of over 2500 research articles published in 2019 in work and family research internationally).

Oh, Eunsil. 2018. “Who Deserves to Work? How Women Develop Expectations of Child Care Support in Korea.” Gender & Society 32(4):493–515.

◊ Winner of the 2017 Graduate Student Award, RC28, International Sociological Association.

◊ Winner of the 2017 Graduate Student Award, Association of Korean Sociologists in America, American Sociological Association.