About me

Mei-Yu Kuo (“Mei,” pronounced as “May”) is a sociologist and demographer studying gender, work & family, and migration. She is interested in how social institutions and population dynamics stratify society across individual and historical time.

She is broadly interested in gender inequality in contemporary societies and how social institutions interact with gender systems to produce divergent trajectories in work, family, and other life outcomes. One of her forthcoming papers in Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, based on her second-year paper, examines how gendered college major choices contribute to differential labor force integration across genders and create wage disparities—an angle largely neglected by previous studies on gendered employment dynamics. Another project in this strand investigates how college pathways shape young men’s and women’s union formation patterns through divergent socioeconomic trajectories; this work received the Poster Award in the Family Demography Session at the Population Association of America Annual Meeting and the Best Thesis Award from the Population Association of Taiwan.

The second strand of her research focuses on migration, assimilation, and integration into U.S. society. She is currently working on projects examining the health outcomes of immigrants, including whether or not immigrants maintain their health advantage across generation, and what mechanisms underlie these patterns. In the future, she plans to explore how immigrants assimilate into the U.S. through gendered and cultural processes and the implications for their economic and health well-being.

Mei is currently a PhD candidate in Sociology at The Ohio State University. She obtained her M.A. in Sociology from National Taiwan University and her B.A. in Journalism from National Chengchi University. She welcomes contact via email at kuo.355@buckeyemail.osu.edu.