Austin Lee is a sociologist and reproductive justice scholar who studies how race, gender, and class shape family life and the work of caring for others. Her research examines who is expected to care for children and what authority women have to negotiate those responsibilities. She returns to categories that population science often treats as neutral, including fertility, kinship, and family structure, to recover the human dimensions of population metrics.

Not having children does not free Black women from the obligation to mother. Lee develops this insight in her book manuscript, Compulsory Mothering: Black Women, Reproductive Labor, and Relational Autonomy. Drawing on interviews with 80 class-diverse Black women, she investigates how social class and parental status shape women’s experiences with communal mothering and their ability to negotiate its demands. Her quantitative study of who cares for other people’s children extends this attention to care beyond parenthood, while her future archival research examines how the state governs reproductive life.

Lee is a research affiliate at the University of Pennsylvania’s Population Studies Center and previously held a postdoctoral appointment in the Boston University Society of Fellows. She earned her Ph.D. in Sociology with a Graduate Certificate in Africana Studies from the University of Pennsylvania. Alongside her academic research, she works as an evaluation consultant with Women’s Way, developing surveys and reports on gender equity in organizational policies and programs. Her research has received support from the National Science Foundation, the American Association of University Women, and the University of Pennsylvania.