About
I am a sociologist and demographer who studies the political economy of care work and its relationship to family formation. I am currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for Race, Inequality, and Social Equity Studies at Harvard.

Through quantitative studies, I explore how the family outcomes of some depend on the control they have over the reproductive labor of others. My dissertation examines how the racial division of reproductive labor between domestic workers and middle-class households shapes historical racial inequalities in family formation. Using full count Census data from 1910 to 1940, I show how changes to the labor market for domestic workers brought about by Black women’s migration to cities made it easier for White women to marry earlier and have more children. A paper from this project, Marriage and the Racial Division of Reproductive Labor: Evidence from the Great Migration, 1910-1940, was recently awarded the Dorothy S. Thomas Award for best graduate student paper by the Population Association of America.

During my postdoc, I am developing a related project that asks how Black women’s migration and occupational segregation into domestic work in the early twentieth century affected their own family formation. Beyond my historical work, I have published papers on the role of income dynamics in the Black-White wealth gap and methods for linking and harmonizing large-scale micro data. I work primarily with publicly available survey data, including full count historical Census data.

Peer Reviewed Articles
Ashman, Hero, and Seth Neumuller. 2020. “Can Income Differences Explain the Racial Wealth Gap? A Quantitative Analysis.” Review of Economic Dynamics 35:220–39. (link)

Working Papers
Ashman, Hero. "Marriage and the Racial Division of Reproductive Labor: Evidence from the Great Migration, 1910-1940."

Bloome, Deirdre, Hero Ashman, and Leslie McCall. "Economic Self-Reliance and Gender Inequality Across Racialized/Ethnic Groups: Assessing the Family’s Role."