I am on the 2025-2026 academic job market and would be happy to meet at ASA or virtually. See my CV
Hi, I’m Jaime Hsu, a doctoral candidate in Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin, where I specialize in Demography and hold a doctoral portfolio in Health and Aging. My research and teaching focus on gender and sexuality, health and aging, work and family, and medical sociology. Broadly, I study how economic and health inequalities are shaped by gender and sexuality using quantitative and demographic approaches with large-scale population data.
You can see my published work in Social Problems, Demography, Social Forces, Social Science Research , Social Science & Medicine, among others. I am affiliated with the Population Research Center, Center for Aging and Population Sciences, and the Urban Ethnography Lab at the University of Texas at Austin.
Across my projects, I treat gender not as a fixed individual trait but as something that takes shape through relationships and everyday life—how people interact with one another, share resources, and express themselves in their families and communities. My dissertation applies this perspective to examine how household finances, family relationships, and health are intertwined across different-sex and same-sex families. Using national U.S. data and dyadic data that include both partners, I show how financial stress can reverberate across relationships, affecting both partners’ marital relationships and mental wellbeing in ways that depend on gender dynamics within the couple.
In addition to my dissertation, I worked on the embodied costs of gender nonconformity in the labor market. I use survey data to examine how gender nonconformity shapes individuals’ labor market outcomes across their gender and sexual identities (Hsu 2024). Other collaborative projects include the timing to dating relationships (Mernitz, Hsu and Bishop 2023) and to union formations (Mernitz, Hsu and Pollitt 2024) among sexual minority youth, and the mental health consequences of intimate relationships for sexual minority youth (Hsu and Mernitz 2024, 2025).
With Drs. Faith Deckard (UCLA), Shannon Malone Gonzalez (UNC-Chapel Hill), and Yasmiyn Irizarry (UT Austin), our projects examine how different types of police contact contributes to Black women’s mental health using a novel dataset, one of which has been published in Social Forces. (In Her Place, data effort by Drs. Shannon Malone Gonzalez & Yasmiyn Irizarry).
I am a graduate researcher in the Health and Relationship Project under the supervision of Dr. Deb Umberson, and part of a collaborative qualitative research on bi+ people and their marital dynamics with researchers from UT Austin, Ohio State University (Dr. Rin Reczek), and University of Alabama at Birmingham (Dr. Mieke Thomeer). Originally, I started as a qualitative researcher in the field of transnational family and information technologies (Hsu 2021).
Outside academia, I am a home cook and a proud kitty foster parent.
