Francine D. Blau is Frances Perkins Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations and Labor Economics at Cornell University. She is also a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a Research Fellow of the Center for Economic Studies/Ifo Institute in Munich, Germany and of IZA in Bonn, Germany. She received her Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University in 1975 and her B.S. from the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University in 1966. Dr. Blau was first Vice President of the Society of Labor Economics and President in 2006. She is also Chair of the American Economic Association Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession. She has served as President of the Industrial Relations Research Association, Vice President of the American Economic Association, and President of the Midwest Economics Association. She is a fellow of the Society of Labor Economics and 2001 recipient of the Carolyn Shaw Bell Award from the American Economic Association Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession for furthering the status of women in the economics profession.

Dr. Blau was formerly an editor of the Journal of Labor Economics, on the Board of Editors of the American Economic Review, on the Advisory Board of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, and an Associate Editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives. She has written extensively on gender issues, wage inequality and international comparisons of labor market outcomes. Dr. Blau is author of Equal Pay in the Office and, along with Lawrence Kahn, author of At Home and Abroad: U.S. Labor Market Performance in International Perspective (recipient of the Richard A. Lester Prize for the Outstanding Book in Labor Economics and Industrial Relations published in 2002). She is also co-author, with Marianne Ferber and Anne Winkler, of The Economics of Women, Men, and Work, currently going into its 5th edition.