Ito Peng is the Canada Research Chair in Global Social Policy, Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at the Department of Sociology and the School of Public Policy and Governance, and the Director of the Centre for Global Social Policy. She teaches political sociology and comparative public policy, specializing in family and gender policies and comparative welfare states. She has written extensively on gender, labour market, and political economy of social policy reforms in East Asia.
Professor Peng is the Project Director for the Care Economies in Context project, and was previously the Project Director for the Gender, Migration and the Work of Care project. She is also a co-principal investigator with Otgontugs Banzragc invstigating the care economy in Mongolia, and is collaborating with Monica Alexander on a project investigating the position of unregulated nannies in the Canadian childcare landscape. She is starting a project exploring the intersections of care and climate change.
In 2022, she was inducted into the Royal Society of Canada, and in 2023 she received the President’s Impact Award and the Carolyn Tuohy Impact on Public Policy Award at the University of Toronto. These awards recognize her contributions to various policy communities, particularly in placing care work on the policy agenda in Canada and elsewhere.