Liana C. Sayer

Liana C. Sayer is a Professor and Chair of Sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park, and Director of the Maryland Time Use Laboratory. Her research focuses on gendered time use, cross-national comparisons of household labor, and the interplay of economic resources with relationship dynamics. She teaches courses on sociology and has contributed to major journals like the Journal of Marriage and Family and American Journal of Sociology.

Education: PhD in Sociology and Certificate in Women's Studies (2001), University of Maryland; MA in Political Science (1991), University of Pennsylvania; BA in Government (1983), University of Texas.

Research Themes:

• Cross-national determinants of gendered time use
• Gender, class, and race in domestic labor and relationship processes
• Innovative time-use data collection methods
• Life-course influences of time allocation

Current projects explore temporal disparities across social groups and global trends in time use, emphasizing intersections of gender, race, and class. She has advised multiple graduate students and led major grants in time-use research.

Liana’s work addresses the socio-cultural structures shaping time allocation, revealing how gendered institutions perpetuate inequality. She is Editor of the Journal of Marriage and Family and collaborates internationally on time-use data initiatives.

Labs/Teams: Maryland Time Use Lab, leading efforts to advance time-diary methodologies and analyze global time-use datasets.