About
78
Publications
51,467
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
1,493
Citations
Introduction
Yang's research focuses on changing work-family and gender relations and intersectional inequalities in a global context.
His research contributes to advancing social justice, equality, and understandings of how macro socio-economic, political and institutional developments and cultural changes (re)configure everyday work-family and intimate lives.
[Website: www.yanghu.co.uk]
Current institution
Education
October 2010 - October 2015
Publications
Publications (78)
Exploring how people negotiate and reconcile, construct and re-construct their distinctive gender and ethnic identities in a cross-cultural context, Hu examines what happens when two distinct cultures meet at the intimate interface of marriage and family. Chinese-British Intermarriage reveals how gender and ethnic identities intersect in distinctiv...
Objective: This research investigates the role played by household financial organization in configuring the housework participation of women and men and in moderating the influence of earnings on housework.
Background: Existing research has focused on the ways in which earnings shape gendered power and housework performance in couple relationshi...
Age is one of the most widely used indicators in social research. However, the ways in which age influences the dynamics and outcomes of social interactions have received insufficient attention. The contextual configurations of this influence are particularly under-researched. Analysing data from the European Social Survey, I exploit the case of a...
The ways in which partners manage their money provide important clues to gender inequality in and the nature of couple relationships. Analyzing data from nationally representative surveys (N = 11,730 couples), I examine changes across British cohorts born between the 1920s and 1990s in their household financial management, and how the changes vary...
The extent to which people’s social status is associated with their parents’ status has far-reaching implications for the openness of and stratification in society. Whereas most research focused on the father-child association in advanced economies, less is known about the role mothers play in intergenerational mobility, particularly in a global co...
Research on gender ideology and housework tends to treat gender ideology as an individual characteristic but has paid less attention to the interactional process in which both spouses' gender ideologies jointly shape their housework time. Analysing longitudinal dyadic data from the United Kingdom (1993–2020) using the actor-partner interdependence...
The quality and stability of couple relationships have far-reaching consequences for the well-being of individual partners and patterns of family change. Although much research has compared the quality and stability of same-sex and different-sex relationships, the multidimensional nature of sexuality has received insufficient attention in this scho...
As generative large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT gain widespread adoption in various domains, their potential to propagate and amplify social biases, particularly in high-stakes areas such as the labor market, has become a pressing concern. AI algorithms are not only widely used in the selection of job applicants, individual job seekers m...
Job advertisements (ads) represent the first point of contact between employers and job seekers. By signaling characteristics expected of an ideal candidate, job ads “gatekeep” the labor force and configure its composition. Meanwhile, labor force composition can also shape the wording of job ads. This study develops a multidimensional inventory of...
Objectives: Living apart together (LAT)—intimate partners living in separate households—is a common partnership type among older adults. Although the mental health benefits of intimate partnerships are widely documented, how LAT relates to older adults’ mental health remains understudied.
Methods: Analyzing Waves 3–13 (2011–2023) of the United Kin...
Increasing evidence links arts engagement with mental health, but the directionality of the link remains unclear. Applying a novel approach to causal inference, we used non-recursive instrumental variable models to analyse two waves of data from the United Kingdom Household Longitudinal Study (N = 17,927). Our findings reveal bidirectional causal r...
Rapid technological change is touching families in Canada in profound ways. The deepening of digital reach has wide-ranging implications for family life and policy in Canada, and has spurred public discussions about the benefits, perils, and need for regulation of digital technologies. This Issue Brief provides an overview of key issues surrounding...
With rapid digitalization, people increasingly use information and communication technologies (ICTs). Analyzing European Social Survey data across 29 countries, we address an under-researched question: how is the labor of using ICTs for digital communication gendered across the domains of work and family? Using latent profile analysis, we identify...
The internet and digital technologies have penetrated all domains of people's lives, and family life is no exception. Despite being a characterizing feature of contemporary family change, the digitalization of family life has yet to be systematically theorized. Against this backdrop, this article develops a multilevel conceptual framework for under...
Objective: This study examines, for the first time in Canada, the relationship between how different-sex couples meet and assortative mating on education, race, nativity, and age.
Background: Extending research on how the likelihood of heterogamy differed between offline and online dating, this study disentangles the implications of institutional...
Background
The COVID-19 pandemic and climate crises have led to unprecedented food insecurity in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), with ramifications for people's affective well-being. The aim of the study is to explore the relationship between food insecurity and affective well-being in Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia, and Egypt, considering varie...
Against the backdrop of rapid population ageing and widespread urbanisation, this review explores older people’s needs in urban disaster response. We conducted a systematic review of 120 publications across several related fields – disaster management, gerontology, and urban governance. We identified five needs of older people in disaster response:...
There is growing recognition, in the UK and internationally, of the huge costs of recurrent appearances of parents in local authority care proceedings. This paper contributes to pressing policy and practice concerns to reduce recurrence. It presents qualitative longitudinal data from the first study of fathers' experiences of recurrent care proceed...
Workplace inclusion is a strategic concern for organizations, yet challenging to achieve. We investigate how Information and Communications Technology (ICT) use can enhance workplace inclusion. Based on qualitative data collected from a leading UK organization, we conceptualize four ICT-enabled workplace inclusion practices-Expanding, Orienting, En...
Sexual identity is fluid. But just how fluid is it? How does such fluidity vary across demographic groups? How do mainstream measures fare in capturing the fluidity? In analyzing data from the United Kingdom Household Longitudinal Study (N = 22,673 individuals, each observed twice), this research note provides new, population-wide evidence of sexua...
In this chapter, we develop the ‘transnationalisation of intimacy’ as a conceptual lens to investigate the performance, embodiment and negotiation of transnational familial intimacy in a globalising and digital society. This is achieved by conducting a state-of-the-art review of theories and empirical studies on family relations and practices at th...
This is a Research Briefing accompanying the main research article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01545-5
With the world expansion of education, mothers have an increasingly important role in shaping the educational status of their children, particularly for daughters and in contexts with a high prevalence of mothers who are paired w...
Occupational gender segregation can be traced back to gender-typed occupational aspirations formed early in life. Analyzing nationally representative data from the 2010–2018 China Family Panel Studies (N = 2,410 adolescents aged 10–19), we examine the relationships between parents’ occupations, their gender-(a)typical occupational expectations, and...
Research has documented how maternal employment influences daughters’ participation in paid employment. However, we know far less about how maternal employment during daughters’ adolescence relates to the daughters’ subsequent employment stability. Analyzing data from three waves (2006, 2012, and 2018) of the Egypt Labor Market Panel Survey (N = 3,...
This case study focusses on the BIAS project, an interdisciplinary and international collaboration between researchers in Canada and the UK, investigating Responsible AI for labour market equality. The project was funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) u...
Despite progress towards gender equality in the labor market over the past few decades, gender segregation in labor force composition and labor market outcomes persists. Evidence has shown that job advertisements may express gender preferences, which may selectively attract potential job candidates to apply for a given post and thus reinforce gende...
The language used in job advertisements contains explicit and implicit cues, which signal employers’ preferences for candidates of certain ascribed characteristics, such as gender and ethnicity/race. To capture such biases in language use, existing word inventories have focused predominantly on gender and are based on general perceptions of the ‘ma...
In this intervention, we discuss how the COVID-19 pandemic has reconfigured transnational mobilities, connections, and solidarities, which reveals the fragility of transnationalism predicated on cosmopolitan ethics but rooted in nation-level politics. We show that as the pandemic severely disrupted transnational (infra)structures predicated on stat...
This article charts the transformation, between 1997 and 2021, of the family visa and immigration permit infrastructure from a public into a commercial service in the United Kingdom (UK). In doing so, it reveals a process of state-market hybridisation underpinning the commercialisation of migration regulation. Drawing on the analysis of legal archi...
Interacting with family members and friends from other households is a key part of everyday life and is crucial to people’s mental well-being. The COVID-19 pandemic severely curtailed face-to-face contact between households, particularly for older adults (aged 60 and above), due to their high risk of developing severe illness if infected by COVID-1...
Purpose: This study examines the mental health impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on adolescents in the United Kingdom as well as social, demographic, and economic variations in the impact. Methods:
Nationally representative longitudinal panel data from the Understanding Society COVID-19 survey were analyzed. The analytical sample comprises 886 adoles...
Final Report for the Project: ‘Up Against It’: Understanding Fathers’ Repeat Appearance in Local Authority Care Proceedings
Funded by the Nuffield Foundation
Immigrant Chinese fathers remain severely under-researched despite their sizable and growing presence in host countries around the world and the recent progress in research on immigrant and ethnic minority fathers. In this chapter, we review the major themes and methods used in existing studies involving immigrant Chinese fathers and explore reason...
Going beyond a focus on individual‐level employment outcomes, we investigate couples’ changing work patterns in the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States (US) during the COVID‐19 pandemic. Analyzing longitudinal panels of 2,186 couples from the Understanding Society COVID‐19 Survey (UK) and 2,718 couples from the Current Population Survey (US),...
The fatherhood scholarship has made much theoretical progress over the past decades, yet existing models and concepts continue to draw primarily on WEIRD (western, educated,
industrialized, rich, and democratic societies)-centric assumptions. This review uses demographically sizeable, culturally significant, yet understudied and under-theorized Chi...
This article presents data from the first large-scale study of fathers involved in repeat (or recurrent) care proceedings in England. The project complements important research on mothers and recurrence. It consisted of three elements: an analysis of population-level administrative data from the Child and Family Court Advisory and Support Service (...
The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and associated responses such as border closure, lockdown measures and flight controls have severely disrupted transnational infrastructures that sustain, channel, organize, and condition international migration. This infrastructural disruption has led to the double exclusion of temporary migrants from both sen...
Analyzing new nationwide data from the Understanding Society COVID-19 survey (N = 10,336), this research examines intersecting ethnic and native–migrant inequalities in the impact of COVID-19 on people’s economic well-being in the UK. The results show that compared with UK-born white British, black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) migrants in the...
The service industry is a major pillar of China's urban economy. Rural migrant workers form the backbone workforce in China's urban service sector. Despite much attention to the work and life of rural migrants in Chinese cities, urban employers' regulation and rural migrants' performance of emotional labour in the service sector remain understudied...
Family changes in China are characterized by a dual rise in marital disruption and remarriage. However, the implications of these changes for child well-being remain understudied. I analyze data from the 2015 China Education Panel Survey to profile and explain well-being disparities between children in intact, disrupted and remarried families. Chil...
Background
Despite progress in understanding mothers' (re)appearances within family justice, fathers have not yet received due attention in research on recurrent care proceedings. Aims Compare parents' gendered risks of entering subsequent care proceedings; Map family relations underpinning recurrent care proceedings; Investigate the role of family...
[Both authors contributed equally to this work, and their names are listed alphabetically.]
Background
Family change in China is characterized by increasing divorce rates and a growing number of remarriages, like in many Western countries. Assortative mating is a crucial part of the institution of (re)marriage and it plays a key role in the (re)pr...
In the wake of a “national care crisis” in England, an increasing number of parents return to the family court as repeat respondents in care proceedings and lose successive children from their care. Despite considerable progress in understanding the trends and patterns of mothers’ (re)appearances in care proceedings, knowledge of fathers and of par...
Every year, millions of young people migrate away from their home provinces for higher education and employment in China. However, less is known about the extent to which Chinese young people may benefit economically from their migration. Analyzing nationally representative data from the new China College Student Survey, this paper examines the imp...
Drawing on data from the 2010 China Family Panel Studies, this research investigates the gendered patterns of the time spent by girls and boys on housework in families with distinct structures, with the presence at home or absence from home of the mother, father, elder/younger sister and brother, and male/female extended family members. The results...
Drawing on data from the China Family Panel Studies, this article assesses the state of gender equality among Chinese children under the one-child policy. We demonstrate the importance of conducting intra-gender and inter-gender comparisons taking into account the perspectives of parents and children and the intergenerational (in)congruence between...
This article sheds new light on the role played by perceived fairness in configuring the relationship between gendered housework division and women’s family life satisfaction across 30 countries. This is achieved by distinguishing and comparing two major dimensions of women’s fairness comparison—inter-gender relational comparison between partners a...
Analyzing event history data from the 2010 China Family Panel Studies and 13 qualitative
interviews, we examine the complex and gendered relationship between family relations and
remarriage in China. Distinct roles are played by the presence of pre-school, school-age and
adult children in configuring the remarriage of women and men after divorce an...
Background: In an increasingly interconnected world, understanding the formation of transnational orientations is of great importance. Attitudes toward transnational intermarriage are telling of people’s view of the transnational world and their perceived social distance between countries and regions.
Objective: The purpose of this research is to...
This research contributes to the booming literature on the mobility of international students in higher education. Specifically, it analyzes university-level factors that affect the sorting of Chinese international students across British universities. To do so, we produced a unique dataset merging university-level data from the the 2014 UK Higher...
A growing number of studies examine how, why, and when people form and maintain living apart together (LAT) relationships. Although this literature shows that LAT is a diverse and ambiguous practice, little is known about whether people live apart together in particular ways under distinct constellations of life course circumstances. Moreover, it i...
Western research has shown that a shortage of living space is associated with poor psychological well-being. By contrast, norms and practices of extended family co-residence, collectivist social organization and a bureaucratic quota-based housing allocation system were thought to limit the adverse psychological effects of cramped dwelling condition...
Background: Who marries whom has important implications for the (re-)production of social inequalities. Whereas previous studies on marital sorting have mainly focused on the husband’s and the wife’s traits, in this research I assess the importance of parental background in marital sorting in contemporary China in light of the tradition of marriage...
This chapter develops a theoretical framework that guides the analysis and presentation of data. It addresses the relevance of ethnicity and gender in the study of ethnic intermarriage in view of macro-social trends such as individualisation and globalisation. The use of ethnicity and gender as tools in the analysis of everyday social life is first...
For Chinese-British inter-ethnic families with homemaking marriage-migrant Chinese wives, ethnic-cum-gender identities such as domestic Chinese women and masculine British men seem to play important roles in the formation and organisation of their family and social lives. Exploring the couple’s consensual accounts and the individual narratives of t...
While most of the marriage migrants opted for domesticity and most of the professional migrants retained their professional careers after marriage and migration, some families beat the odds and opted for domestic and social arrangements atypical to their distinctive immigration pathways. This chapter focuses on the subset of ‘off-tracker’ families...
This chapter describes the diverse life-course trajectories of Chinese-British inter-ethnic families in the UK. Continuing the work done in the introduction, it traces two distinct immigration pathways—marriage and professional—through to two distinct patterns in the families’ lives, as differentiated by the gender-role orientation of the couples:...
This chapter examines Chinese-British inter-ethnic families with working professional migrant Chinese wives. It underlines the role of women as professional migrants, rather than low-skilled workers and ‘trailing wives’, in initiating migration and intermarriage. It reveals the professional Chinese women’s struggle to reject the ideal of ‘womanly C...
All forms of inter-ethnic contact are preceded by pre-existing stigmas and imaginaries that are imposed by socio-historical forces beyond the manoeuvring of individuals. What is interesting then is how individuals creatively engage with, negotiate and re-invent their identities at the intimate interface between distinct social, cultural and politic...
This chapter explores the everyday life of Chinese-British inter-ethnic families with Chinese husbands. It presents a ‘double reversal’ of ethnic and gender roles that occurs when Chinese husbands assume the unconventional role of homemaker in inter-ethnic families. While the Chinese husbands experienced varying levels of social, cultural and polit...
Drawing on data from the 2006 China General Social Survey, propensity score matching was used to investigate the impact of rural-to-urban migration on family and gender values in China at distinct stages of the migratory process. Little evidence of ideational difference is found between rural natives who intend to migrate to urban areas and those w...
In recent decades, premarital sex, extramarital sex, and homosexuality have become increasingly visible in China, leading scholars to claim that a national “sex revolution” is under way. However, China’s internal sociocultural diversity calls this nation-level generalization into question. How do sex ideologies vary across China’s distinct province...
Differentiated gender roles in adulthood are rooted in one's gender role socialization. In order to understand the persistence of gender inequalities in the domestic sphere, we need to examine the gendered patterns of children's housework time. Although researchers have identified behavior modeling as a major mechanism of gender role reproduction a...
Previous research has reported on structural changes in Chinese families. However, questions remain as to whether/how social change has influenced family and gender values and how this differs across generations, regions, and gender in China. Drawing on 2006 data from the China General Social Survey, we find that values pertaining to filial piety a...
