Hi, I'm Wei Zhuang

Interests

• Time use
• Gender inequality
• Division of labour
• Work & family
• Parenthood
• Longitudinal methods
• Sequence analysis
• Computational social science
• AI literacy
• NLP

Ongoing

My doctoral research, funded by the UKRI North West Social Science Doctoral Training Partnership, uses UK longitudinal and time-use data to examine how paid work, domestic work, and parenthood structure the daily lives of dual-earner couples. I draw on multi-channel sequence analysis, multilevel modelling, and structural equation modelling.

Alongside that, I am developing a strand of work on AI literacy and computational social science. One project examines the social stratification of generative AI literacy, use frequency, and workplace acceptance across eleven European countries. A second uses decade-specific word embeddings to measure where everyday places sit on cultural dimensions across a century of American books, and how far that arrangement holds.

Positions

• 2025–2026Research Assistant, GenTimeGender inequality in time use across East Asian and Western societies. PI Prof. Man-Yee Kan, University of Oxford. Funded by the European Research Council, Horizon 2020, award 771736.
• 2024–2026Research Assistant, PIECEParental Involvement and its Effects on Children's Education. PI Dr Helen Norman, University of Leeds. Funded by Leeds University Business School and the ESRC Secondary Data Analysis Initiative. In collaboration with Parentkind, the Fatherhood Institute and Working Families.
• 2025Visiting Researcher, NIDINetherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute. COORDINATE and the Generations and Gender Programme, funded by EU Horizon 2020.

* Corresponding author

Journal articles

2026

The Division of Labour and Female Partners' Relative Pay across Phases of Parenthood: Evidence from UK Dual-Earner Couples

Zhuang, W.*, Elliot, M., Fagan, C., & Morosow, K. Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World, 12.

DOI

2023

Can Teleworking Improve Workers' Job Satisfaction? Exploring the Roles of Gender and Emotional Well-Being

Lu, Z., & Zhuang, W.* Applied Research in Quality of Life, 18(3).

DOI

2023

Supervertex Sampling Network: A Geodesic Differential SLIC Approach for 3D Mesh

Zhuang, J., Zeng, P., Zhuang, W., Guo, X., & Liu, P. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 30(8), 5553–5565.

DOI

2022

NGD-Transformer: Navigation Geodesic Distance Positional Encoding with Self-Attention Pooling for Graph Transformer on 3D Triangle Mesh

Zhuang, J., Liu, X., & Zhuang, W.* Symmetry, 14(10), 2050.

DOI

Revise and resubmit

Under review

Working papers

2026

Fathers' work-life balance: why occupational class matters in the UK

Norman, H., Zhuang, W., Jones, R., & Davies, J. Fatherhood Institute Blog.

Read

2025

What influences fathers' involvement at school, and why does it matter?

Norman, H., & Zhuang, W. Project Report, PIECE Study.

Project site Report (PDF)

2025

Dads and school involvement: could do better?

Norman, H., Zhuang, W., & Davies, J. Parentkind Blog.

Read

Selected presentations

• 20267th International Conference on Social ComputingGender Typing and Symbolic Value in American Everyday Spaces, 1900 to 2009 (poster), and The Social Stratification in Generative AI Literacy across 11 European Countries.
• 2026Work and Family Researchers Network ConferenceMapping Couples' Daily Rhythms.
• 2025BSA Annual ConferenceThe Division of Labour and Couple Pay Gap Across Four Phases of Parenthood, and Dads and School Involvement.
• 202446th IATUR ConferenceQuantity or Quality of Time Use.
• 2023BSA Work, Employment & Society ConferenceCan Homeworkers Have More Stable Work Schedules?

Education

• 2022–2026PhD, Social Statistics, University of ManchesterThesis submitted September 2026, awaiting viva. Supervisors Prof. Mark Elliot, Prof. Colette Fagan, Dr Kathrin Morosow. Funded by ESRC NWSSDTP.
• 2021–2022MSc, Social Research Methods and Statistics, University of ManchesterDistinction.
• 2020–2021MSc, User Experience Engineering, Goldsmiths, University of LondonDistinction.
• 2016–2020Bachelor of Communication, Media Arts and Design, Hong Kong Baptist University2.1, First Class Scholarship.

Teaching

Teaching Assistant at the University of Manchester, 2023 to 2026.

Undergraduate. SOST20131 Answering Social Research Questions with Statistical Models.

Postgraduate. DATA70121 Statistics and Machine Learning, and SOST70033 Data Science Modelling.

Service

Peer reviewer for Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, Social Indicators Research, and Applied Research in Quality of Life.

Technical skills

Languages. Stata, R, and Python.

Statistical modelling. Longitudinal data analysis, multilevel modelling, structural equation modelling, latent growth curve modelling, multi-channel sequence analysis, survival analysis, complex survey analysis, multiple imputation (MICE), and principal component analysis.

Computational methods. Word embeddings (word2vec), transformer models, variational autoencoders, and natural language processing for social science applications.