Ridhi Kashyap

My research spans different topics in demography and sociology, including questions linked to mortality and health, gender inequality, marriage and family, and migration and ethnicity. I am broadly interested in exploring how social inequalities interact with demographic processes, and how different methodological approaches and quantitative data sources can be used to measure and understand these interactions.

In a significant line of research emerging from my doctoral work, I examine the demographic implications of one of the most striking expressions of gender inequality — son preference. I am interested in both the postnatal manifestations of son preference in the form of gender gaps in mortality and health, as well as in the prenatal manifestations in the form of sex-selective abortion and sex ratio at birth distortions. I am also interested in thinking about the long-term implications of son preference and sex ratio distortions for population dynamics. In the areas of family demography, I have been studying the relationship between educational expansion, gender norms, and marriage and partnership patterns in different contexts. I have also worked on topics of ethnicity and migration, and explored demographic characteristics and social attitudes of ethnic minorities in Britain. 

As co-leader of the strand on digital and computational demography at the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science, I am working to advance the use and applications of digital and computational innovations in social research, and examine the implications of digital technologies on demographic and development outcomes. I am interested in how digital and computational innovations, both as a set of models (e.g agent-based models, microsimulation, machine learning) and new types of data sources (e.g digital trace data), can contribute to social science.  A recurring substantive topic of interest is how, where and when technological changes affect social change and reshape social norms, and how ‘online’ and ‘offline’ inequalities interact.