Xiaowen Han Examines How Careers Shape Our Lives

After beginning her academic journey with questions about inequality, Xiaowen Han came to graduate school wanting to understand why people’s careers and the rewards they receive from them differ so dramatically over time. Today, as a sociology PhD student at the University of Minnesota, she studies how the quality of work people experience across their lives shapes long-term health and well-being.

What do you study and how did you become interested in it?

I study social stratification in labor market experiences over the life course and its consequences for workers' health and well-being. In simpler terms, I’m interested in why people end up on career paths that offer such unequal rewards, both in earnings and in the overall quality of their work. Since we spend over a third of our lives working, it's crucial to understand what work brings to different people and how gains and losses accumulate into long-term health disparities.

In my dissertation, I specifically examine how workers accumulate intrinsic rewards, including autonomy, a sense of achievement, opportunities to learn and use skills, alongside wage income over their working lives, and how these patterns shape physical and cognitive health decades later near retirement. This research is driven by a striking paradox: surveys show that people place intrinsic job qualities above almost everything else, even pay. But most academic work has centered on wage inequalities, leaving less understanding of how people come to attain these important intrinsic rewards. I use longitudinal survey data tracking respondents over decades to study how intrinsic rewards intersect with wage inequalities to shape divergent career trajectories and lasting health impacts.

I think my research resonates with widespread public conversations about what jobs mean to people, both in the United States and internationally. As younger generations enter the labor market amid economic uncertainty and shifting values around work, many are asking fundamental questions: Why work at a particular job when it requires trading off important values? What does this choice mean for my life in the long run? These aren't just individual anxieties; they reflect structural inequalities in access to good work. Looking forward, I want to deepen my understanding of what jobs and careers bring to people across the entire life course, and how we might create labor markets where meaningful, healthy, and fairly compensated work isn't only a privilege reserved for few.

What brought you to the University of Minnesota?

I chose the University of Minnesota because it offered the resources and training I needed to succeed, especially since I entered the sociology PhD program without previous formal study in the field. The sociology department at UMN has a distinctive strength of welcoming students from diverse backgrounds. With this, its faculty expertise spans interdisciplinary fields, creating an intellectually generous environment where I can build a foundation while pursuing ambitious research questions.

A pivotal factor was the opportunity to join the Youth Development Study (YDS) as a research assistant, working with Dr. Jeylan Mortimer, who became one of my co-advisors. YDS is a longitudinal study that has followed a cohort of youth who attended St. Paul public high schools starting in 1988, collecting data over three decades on their work experiences, life choices, and key transitions. 

Getting into the weeds of survey data management and coordination gave me an invaluable apprenticeship. I came to appreciate the beauty of social surveys: how they systematize intangible and complex life experiences from large, representative groups into measurable, analyzable data that enables structural understanding of social patterns and mechanisms. This firsthand experience with data collection smoothed my entry into the research world and connected me with collaborators sharing similar interests in work, health, and life course dynamics.

Beyond my department, the Minnesota Population Center (MPC) provided interdisciplinary training that has been transformative, and the broader CLA community offered intellectual breadth. What makes UMN an ideal academic home is the combination of rigorous disciplinary training, exceptional longitudinal data resources, mentorship from faculty conducting cutting-edge life course research, and an institutional culture that values both methodological rigor and substantive questions about inequality and human lives.

Do you have a graduate minor? How does it complement your major?

I have a graduate minor in population studies through the Minnesota Population Center (MPC). Population studies, or demography, aligns naturally with sociology. While sociology examines social structures, relationships, and behaviors broadly, demography focuses on population-level patterns in mortality, fertility, and migration. Social demography bridges the two by analyzing how social factors shape demographic processes.

The population studies training has been invaluable, particularly in learning how demographic and sociological methods compare and complement each other. Without this minor, I would have missed the interdisciplinary community. MPC creates a platform for exchange with students and faculty from demography, public policy, public health, economics, psychology, and even clinical medical sciences. These interactions through seminars and events have fundamentally shaped how I think about my research questions. 

Working at the intersection of multiple disciplines has taught me to translate concepts across different scholarly languages and recognize when insights from one field can illuminate problems in another. Without this training, my work would be more narrowly focused, and I'd lack the methodological versatility and interdisciplinary perspective that have become central to how I approach research on work, health, and inequality over the life course.

Tell us about a current project you're working on

Apart from my dissertation, I've been working on a project examining extended work among older adults: why some people work into their 60s, 70s, and beyond while others retire early, what job qualities make people want to continue working, and critically, whether working longer preserves or accelerates cognitive decline. 

This project extends my dissertation research on work reward trajectories to address a demographic reality often overlooked: more workers than ever are extending careers well beyond the traditional "prime working years" of 25-54. This raises crucial questions about motivation and consequence. Are people working longer because their jobs provide meaningful engagement, i.e., the intrinsic rewards I study in my dissertation, or are they driven primarily by financial need? And does why you work longer determine how it affects your cognitive health?

What makes this methodologically challenging is the complex bidirectional relationship between work and health. Work rewards might causally contribute to slower cognitive decline, but healthier people are also more able and willing to work longer. Disentangling these reciprocal effects requires rigorous causal inference methods. To tackle this, I've been learning advanced statistical techniques, including pursuing a master's degree in biostatistics, to apply causal inference methods that handle time-varying confounding.

I hope to show that the consequences of working longer depend heavily on job quality. Policies encouraging extended work lives without attention to job quality could inadvertently harm vulnerable workers. Conversely, if cognitively engaging work protects against decline, we need to understand how to make such work accessible. This project continues my core interest in how job quality shapes life outcomes while expanding focus to the entire life course.

What are the biggest takeaways from your graduate career?

While I'm still finalizing my dissertation, the preliminary findings reveal something that challenges conventional wisdom about work. This is that you don't actually have to choose between meaningful work and good pay. My research shows that intrinsic rewards, such as autonomy, skill use, meaningful tasks, and wage income typically grow together over people's working lives. Workers who experience faster wage growth also tend to see their jobs become more fulfilling and challenging over time, creating a troubling pattern where labor market inequality becomes multidimensional. 

I've also found that these two types of rewards protect our health in different but complementary ways. Higher wages buffer against physical health problems like chronic conditions, while intrinsic rewards promote better mental health and cognitive functioning as we age.

We're often told we must sacrifice one for the other, such as taking the soulless corporate job for the paycheck or following your passion and accepting poverty wages. However, my findings suggest that this is a false choice that masks exploitation. For individual workers, especially younger people making career decisions, this means being skeptical of jobs that demand you sacrifice everything on one dimension for the other. A position offering "passion" but poverty wages, or high pay with complete alienation, may signal problematic working conditions rather than an inevitable trade-off.

For policymakers, if disadvantaged workers experience deficits in both wage growth and intrinsic reward accumulation, policies focused solely on raising wages will address only half the problem. We need interventions that improve job quality holistically, considering autonomy, skill development, and meaningful work alongside compensation.

This story was edited by Bayleigh Bergner, an undergraduate student in CLA.