Yanwen Wang

I study stratification, demography, and ethnicity.

Portrait of Yanwen Wang

Hello there! I’m Yanwen Wang, a Postdoctoral Associate in the Division of Social Science at New York University Abu Dhabi.

I study who people marry and whether they have children — and what those choices reveal about ethnic, educational, and cultural divides in rapidly changing societies. As a quantitative sociologist and demographer, I work at the intersection of family demography, social stratification, and race and ethnicity across multiethnic societies in Asia and beyond.

My main line of work studies ethnic boundaries through intermarriage. I trace three decades of interethnic marriage in China, showing the diverse ways spouses trade educational and ethnic status across the Han–minority divide, and provide the first nationwide account of caste and ethnic intermarriage in Nepal. Building on this, my ongoing projects extend this agenda to fertility within Han–minority intermarriages under the One-Child Policy, to ethnic variations in women’s homemaking patterns, and to panethnic formation in China.

A second line examines how people sort into partnerships — long structured by education and status, and now increasingly by values, beliefs, and life orientations. My forthcoming article in Demography explains why the ways couples pair by education in China — marrying an equal, marrying up, or marrying down — have shifted across generations. Using survey experiments with never-married adults in urban China, I show that relationship ideals now emphasize both status and soul — though in deeply gendered ways: women, far more than men, seek egalitarian partners whose values align with their own. These asymmetries are part of a broader “ideational turn” in which the compatibility of beliefs comes to rival socioeconomic standing in partner selection.

A third line documents how family life itself is changing. I chart pathways toward permanent childlessness — through life-course profiles in Singapore and partnership trajectories in China — and, in ongoing work across 11 countries, the norms that shape contemporary parenting. Across these lines, I also study how family arrangements bear on subjective well-being — including the consequences of intergenerational educational mobility, educational sorting within unions, and the gendered division of income and housework.

My work has been published or forthcoming in Demography, Social Science Research, Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, Chinese Sociological Review, Advances in Life Course Research, Family Relations, and the Journal of Family and Economic Issues.

I earned my Ph.D. in Sociology from the National University of Singapore in 2025, under the mentorship of Prof. Zheng Mu. I also hold an M.A. from the University of Chicago and a B.A. from Nanjing University.

Updates

These updates cover events from the past year and the next six months. Please feel free to say hello if our paths cross at any of them!