Cohen graduated from the University of Michigan with a B.A. in American Culture, from the University of Massachusetts with an M.A. in Sociology, and from the University of Maryland with a Ph.D. in Sociology. His previous faculty positions were at the University of North Carolina and the University of California, Irvine. He is a sociologist and demographer who works in the areas of families and inequality, social demography, and social inequality. His concerns include gender and race/ethnic segregation in occupations, gender and authority, unpaid housework and care work, health disparities, and demographic measurement. He is a member of the American Sociological Association Committee on Publications, and was formerly chair of the ASA's section on Sociology of the Family. He also is an Associate of the Maryland Population Research Center, and was formerly secretary-treasurer of the ASA Population Section. He was co-editor, with , of Contexts, the quarterly magazine of the ASA, from 2014 to 2017.
Books
Cohen has written two books:
The Family: Diversity, Inequality, and Social Change, first published in 2014 by W. W. Norton & Company; the second edition was published in 2018.
Enduring Bonds: Inequality, Marriage, Parenting, and Everything Else That Makes Families Great and Terrible, published in 2018 by the University of California Press.
He is co-editor, with , of The Contexts Reader, a collection of essays from the magazine Contexts, the quarterly magazine of the American Sociological Association.
Research
Cohen's paper on divorce, "The Coming Divorce Decline," reported a drop in U.S. divorce rates from 2008 to 2017, and predicted further declines in the coming years. It was reported by Bloomberg News, the Today show, Buzzfeed, and the Atlantic. His work on labor market inequality has focused on race/ethnic and gender inequality in the United States. On race, he has published in the American Journal of Sociology and Social Forces, assessing the relationship between demographic composition of labor markets and patterns of inequality. In the area of gender inequality, his research has addressed occupational segregation and gender devaluation and the effects of women in workplace management positions. Alone as well as with a number of different co-authors, he has published research on the gender division of household labor. On family structure, he has addressed issues of measurement, including how to identify cohabiting couples in U.S. Census data., and the language used for marriage. On health disparities, he has studied the COVID-19 pandemic in rural U.S. counties, disability rates among adopted children, the living arrangements of children with disabilities, the relationship between parental age and childhood disability, and race/ethnic disparities in infant mortality. Some of Cohen's research is part of the tradition of intersectionality, including his work on the American women's suffrage movement; and on the relationship between population composition and inequality by race, class and gender.
Cohen has been the author of the Family Inequality blog since 2009. His writing has appeared in the New York Times Sunday Review, the Washington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Sociological Images, The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, Boston Review, Huffington Post, Time, Pacific Standard, LSE Impact Blog, The Conversation, Salon, CNN, the Hill, and the New Republic. He has also contributed to news reports for such sources as the New York Times, Time magazine, NPR, the Washington Post, MSNBC and Vox.com. In 2011 he served as a consultant to the United States Census Bureau for its release of the first enumeration of same-sex married couples from the 2010 decennial census. Cohen is an advocate for open scholarship and open access for academic research. He organized SocArXiv, an open research repository for the social sciences. SocArXiv launched Open Scholarship for the Social Sciences, a conference at the University of Maryland, in 2017. He is a plaintiff in the lawsuit Knight First Amendment Institute v. Trump'', filed July 11, 2017. In the lawsuit, a group of Twitter users blocked by U.S. President Donald Trump's account alleged that this blocking was a violation of their First Amendment rights. The case was decided in the plaintiffs' favor on May 23, 2018.
Photography
Cohen's photography has appeared in Contexts magazine, and in news reports.
