Ahyeon Cho

Graduate Student

Biography

Ahyeon (pronounced eye-yawn) is a PhD Candidate in Sociology at UCLA, specializing in family, gender, work, and social demography.

Her research examines how workplace institutions, caregiving responsibilities, and household dynamics jointly shape gender inequality in the labor market. More specifically, her dissertation investigates how workplace evaluations, spouses’ overwork, and linked career trajectories within couples influence employment outcomes across the life course. Combining experimental survey methods with longitudinal panel data from the United States and South Korea, her work explores how careers are shaped not only by labor markets and organizations, but also by family relationships and negotiations within households.

Her current projects include research on the motherhood penalty and workplace evaluations of different forms of caregiving and nonwork commitments, as well as studies using Korean Labor and Income Panel Study (KLIPS) data to examine how spouses’ work conditions and career transitions influence one another over time.

She has also studied racial identity shifts among multiracial individuals from adolescence to middle adulthood using Add Health data, examining how skin tone and racial ancestry shape patterns of racial self-identification across the life course.

Degrees

MA in Sociology, UCLA 2023
MA in Social Sciences, University of Chicago 2021
MA in International Cooperation, Seoul National University 2019
BA in International Studies, Korea University 2016

Fields of Study

Family, Gender, Motherhood, Racial/Ethnic Identity, Social Stratification, Social Demography

Publications

Cho, Ahyeon, and Riley Ceperich. “Strapped for Time? A Survey Experiment of Care, Leisure, and the Motherhood Penalty.” (working paper)

Cho, Ahyeon. “Who Remains Multiracial? Measuring Who Shifts In and Out of the Multiracial Category.” (working paper)

Awards & Grants

NICHD CCPR Trainee Fellowship, UCLA 2024-2025
Best Poster Award, PAA 2024
Graduate Research Mentorship Fellowship, UCLA 2023-2024
NICHD CCPR Trainee Fellowship, UCLA 2022-2023
Graduate Summer Research Mentorship, UCLA 2022
Graduate Dean’s Scholar Award, UCLA 2021
Phoenix Research Award, University of Chicago 2020
Distinguished Thesis Award, Seoul National University 2019
Dean’s Award, Seoul National University 2018
Best Researched Presentation, KOICA/Korea University 2015

Conference Presentations

Cho, Ahyeon and Riley Ceperich. “Strapped for Time? A Survey Experiment of Time Commitments and the Motherhood Wage Penalty,” paper session at the 2026 Work and Family Researchers Network (WFRN) Conference, June 17-20, 2026

Cho, Ahyeon. “Fathers’ Occupational Stability and the Magnitude of the Motherhood Penalty in South Korea: Resource Buffering or Gender Specialization?,” oral presentation at the 2026 Population Association of America (PAA) Conference, May 6-9, 2026

Cho, Ahyeon. “Who Remains Multiracial? Measuring Who Shifts In and Out of the Multiracial Category,” poster presentation at the 2024 Population Association of America (PAA) Conference, April 17-20, 2024 (Poster Winner)

Jeon, Nanum and Ahyeon Cho. “Gender and Ideology and the Centrality of Marriage in South Korea,” presented at the 2023 American Sociological Association (ASA) Conference, August 17-23, 2023

Advisors

Dissertation Committee