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/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 diverse patterns of status exchange 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 the agenda to fertility within Han–minority intermarriages under the One-Child Policy, to ethnic variations in women’s homemaking patterns, and to ethnic boundaries in post-socialist Mongolia.

A second line examines how individuals sort into partnerships — long structured by education and status, and now increasingly by values, attitudes, and life orientations. My forthcoming article in Demography explains why educational sorting in China has followed its distinctive trajectory. Using survey experiments with never-married adults in urban China, I document 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: the pathways toward permanent childlessness — through life-course profiles in Singapore and partnership trajectories in China — and the norms that shape contemporary parenting, which my ongoing work examines across 11 countries. 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 gendered division of income and housework.

My work has been published in Demography, Social Science Research, Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, 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

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