Judith Lorber (born November 28, 1931) is professor emerita of sociology and women’s studies at The CUNY Graduate Center and Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. She is a foundational theorist of social construction of gender difference and has played a vital role in the formation and transformation of gender studies. She has more recently called for a de-gendering of the social world.

Lorber was involved in Sociologists for Women in Society from the early 1970s. She developed and taught some of the first courses in the sociology of gender, women's studies, and feminist theory at Brooklyn College and the graduate school, where she was the first coordinator of the women's studies certificate program in 1988–1991. She was chair of the ASA sex and gender section in 1992–93 and was awarded the Jessie Bernard Award in 1996 “in recognition of scholarly work that has enlarged the horizons of sociology to encompass fully the role of women in society.”

Judith Lorber was born in Brooklyn New York, where she attended public elementary and high school. She graduated from Queens College, City University of New York in 1952, and received an M.A. and Ph.D. from New York University in 1971. She started developing and teaching courses in women's studies in 1972, and taught at Fordham University in the Bronx and at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center until she retired from teaching in 1995. She lives in New York/NY.

The main perspective of Lorber’s work has been social construction—the idea that in social interaction, people produce their identities and statuses, and at the same time, reproduce the structure and constraints of their social world. This perspective analyzes illnesses as social states in which norms and expectations for behavior will emerge from the interaction of patients and health-care workers with each other and with family members, friends, and co-workers. Lorber’s next research project (with Roberta Satow) was interviewing psychiatric residents, social workers, and indigenous paraprofessionals in a ghetto community mental health center on issues of cultural congruity with patients and the stratification of prestige and work assignments.

Judith Lorber’s last work on gender and health care, Gender and the Social Construction of Illness, was published in 1997 as part of the Gender Lens series. A second edition, which she co-authored with Lisa Jean Moore, was published by Rowman and Littlefield in 2002. The book shows that because gender is embedded in the economy, the family, politics, and the medical and legal systems, it is a major factor in the behavior of patients and health care professionals. She also co-authored Gendered Bodies: Feminist Perspectives with Lisa Jean Moore. The first edition was published by Roxbury in 2007, and the second edition by Oxford University Press in 2011. The overall perspective is that of the transformation of the body through gendered social practices.

Her work on women physicians, which culminated in Women Physicians: Careers, Status, and Power, published in 1984, as well as a series of papers published from 1981 to 1987, was a logical combination of her feminism and medical sociology. In it, she showed how the difficulties women physicians encountered in their career advancement when compared to a matched sample of men physicians were the result of the processes of sponsorship and patronage in the informal organization of the medical profession. She thus expanded the analysis of the informal structure of the medical profession, which had been applied only to men physicians, to women, who were, at that point, entering medical school in large numbers.

One of the physicians that Lorber met in the course of her work on women physicians, Florence Haseltine, set her on the road to her next research project—on patient's experiences with one of the new procreative technologies – in vitro fertilization (IVF), doctor-assisted conception. The research she conducted with Lakshmi Bandlamudi and Dorothy Greenfeld found that couples shaped their experiences through their behavior with clinic staff and other caretakers and with each other, creating meaning and some sense of control for themselves. Judith Lorber applied a feminist analysis to the growing use of IVF in male infertility, where the woman is fertile but the man isn't. This situation sets the stage for marital bargaining, in which the woman seemingly is in a strong position, but which turns out to the man's advantage because of his dominance in the gender politics of the family. The feminist, ethical, and medical implications of this research were explored in papers published in the late 1980s.

Lorber’s feminism (and love of science fiction thinking) appeared in print as early as 1975 in "Beyond Equality of the Sexes: The Question of the Children," followed by "Dismantling Noah's Ark" in 1986. In 1987, she became the Founding Editor of Gender & Society, the official publication of Sociologists for Women in Society(SWS). As a hands-on editor, Judith Lorber shaped the papers, the linguistic style, and the emerging themes. The journal was (and still is) extremely successful and is the main source of SWS’s current finances. She and Susan Farrell edited the first Gender & Society reader, The Social Construction of Gender, published in 1991.