Philip Cohen

I’m a professor of sociology and a demographer at the University of Maryland, College Park, where my research and teaching concern families and inequality.

I write about demographic trends, family structure, the division of labor, health disparities, and open science. My commentary on topics ranging from race and gender inequality to parenting, poverty, and popular culture has appeared in outlets such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and the New Republic. The results of my research have been widely reported in major media, and I often comment on new research or trends in the news.

My popular textbook, The Family: Diversity, Inequality, and Social Change, is now in its third edition. For three years I was co-editor, with Syed Ali, of Contexts, the public-facing magazine of the American Sociological Association.

Since 2016, I have been the founding director of SocArXiv, an open archive for the social sciences, and an advocate for open science in the research community. I am active in efforts to reform the system of scholarly communication, and often speak on the topic of how scholars can productively engage with our many public audiences, to improve our work and deepen its impact.

In 2017, I was one of seven individual plaintiffs to sue President Trump for blocking me on Twitter. After victories in circuit and appeals courts, the case, Knight First Amendment Institute v. Trump, was eventually declared moot by the Supreme Court because Trump’s presidency ended before they ruled on its merits.