He is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park,[1] and director of SocArXiv, an open archive of the social sciences.

His concerns include gender and race/ethnic inequality, unpaid housework and care work, health disparities, demographic measurement, and open science.

Since 2016, he has been the director of SocArXiv, and has devoted increasing efforts to the movement for open science, including research in scholarly communication.

On race, he has published in the American Journal of Sociology[17] (with Matt Huffman) and Social Forces,[18] assessing the relationship between demographic composition of labor markets and patterns of inequality.

[22][23][24][25] On family structure, he has addressed issues of measurement, including how to identify cohabiting couples in U.S. Census data.,[26] and the language used for marriage (homogamy and heterogamy).

[33] Some of Cohen's research is part of the tradition of intersectionality, including his work on the American women's suffrage movement;[34] and on the relationship between population composition and inequality by race, class and gender.

[35] In 2007, Cohen testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, on equal pay for women workers.