Laurie C. Maldonado
Laurie C. Maldonado is a social worker, educator, advocate, and an international scholar on single-parent families and policy. She is Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia University School of Social Work (CSSW). She holds a MSW and PhD in social welfare at UCLA.
Dr. Maldonado is passionate about teaching the policy and research series at CSSW. Since 2016, she has taught several courses at CSSW, sharing her expertise in comparative social policy and research. She designed and led a Comparative Welfare State course, which explored the role of social welfare and social policy across countries, including international study trips to Europe.
Her research focuses on gender inequality, poverty, and the interaction between social policy and families, aiming to inform policies, programs, and practices that improve the lives of single parents and their families in the U.S. and globally. Her work is cross-national and comparative, using quantitative data analysis. She was awarded a four-year PhD grant by the Luxembourg National Research Fund, which fully funded her dissertation, Doing Better for Single-Parent Families: Policy and Poverty in 45 Countries. Her research highlights the effectiveness of child support, child benefits, paid leave, and working time policies in reducing poverty for families. Prior to her PhD, she was a pre-doctoral scholar and researcher at The Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality at the Graduate Center, CUNY, and The LIS Cross-National Data Center.
Dr. Maldonado's research has been featured in leading publications, including ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Community, Work, and Family, Oxford Bibliographies in Sociology, the Belgian Social Security Review, the Handbook of Research on In-Work Poverty, and the Handbook of Family Policy. In 2016, her joint research with Rense Nieuwenhuis (Stockholm University) was nominated for the Rosabeth Moss Kanter Award for Excellence in Work-Family Research. Her findings have been cited in policy reports by UN Women, the European Union, and as part of the UN Sustainable Development Goals to eradicate poverty.
Dr. Maldonado co-edited a book The Triple Bind of Single-Parent Families (Bristol University Press), which highlights how single parents face a triple bind of inadequate resources, employment, and policy – which combined, make it really difficult for single parents to provide for themselves and their children. The book presents evidence from over 40 countries, suggesting that these challenges are less about individual factors and more about structural factors that warrant policy solutions. Leading international scholars contribute rigorous research on effective policies to support single-parent families.
She also co-authored the influential report Worst Off: Single-Parent Families in the United States with Tim Casey from Legal Momentum. The study made an important contribution towards understanding the difficult plight of single parents in the U.S. as mostly due to the lack of social policies and protections that are available in other high-income countries.
In 2022, Dr. Maldonado, along with Janet Gornick (Graduate Center CUNY) and Amanda Sheely (London School of Economics) organized an international conference and co-edited a volume on Single-Parent Families and Public Policy in The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. The volume, available to the public for free, was designed to impact U.S. policy by examining effective approaches from high-income countries. The editorial team with Isabelle Sawhill from Brookings Institute, launched a high-profile event with public policy scholars and policy makers that tackled: What does the social science research tell us about what’s most effective in helping single-parent families? What are the prospects for policy reform in the United States? The Brookings Institute Event successfully translated the research to the public and policy stakeholders.
Looking ahead, Dr. Maldonado’s future research and work will continue to focus on families. Her next project will explore how public policy can better support shared parenting after separation and blended families.
Dr. Maldonado loves the social work profession. Prior to her PhD, she worked as a social worker in community-based organizations that served women and children, an experience that continues to shape her research and teaching.