Hyojin Seo is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at King’s Business School, King’s College London. She is affiliated with the King’s Global Institute for Women’s Leadership and the Department of Human Resource Management and Employment Relations. Her research examines gendered precarity and the institutional drivers of labour market inequalities in Europe and East Asia. Methodologically, she specialises in advanced quantitative approaches—including latent class analysis and multilevel modelling—alongside mixed methods research.

Her current Leverhulme-funded project investigates how digitalisation is reshaping perceived long-term career security in the UK and South Korea, with a particular focus on gendered experiences of emerging forms of precarity.

Research interests include:

• Gendered precarity and labour market inequalities
• Digitalisation and Automation of work and new forms of precarity
• Comparative labour markets and social policy (Europe and East Asia)
• Employment quality and social protection
• Quantitative and mixed methods research

Alongside her research, Hyojin co-organises the seminar series 'Opportunities and Challenges of Social Science Research', developed for early career researchers in collaboration with the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) Political Methodology Standing Group. She serves on the editorial boards of Work, Employment and Society and Community, Work & Family, and is a committee member of the Women and Gender Forum at the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE). She is also an international collaborator for the Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs (KIHASA) through the Overseas Korean Scholars Cooperation Network.

Before joining King’s, Hyojin was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Sociology at Tilburg University, where she examined housing inequality and its intersections with labour market precarity. She also held a postdoctoral position at the Centre for Sociological Research at KU Leuven, contributing to the development of a survey module on unpaid labour within paid employment.

Hyojin holds a PhD in Social Policy from the University of Kent. Her doctoral thesis, Gender Matters: Feminisation of Labour Market Outsiders across Europe and the Role of Family Policy, analysed cross-national patterns of labour market dualisation and the gendered impacts of family policy. Her work received the Transfer Young Scholar Award (2021) and the ESPAnet/JESP Doctoral Researcher Prize (2022). She also holds an MA in Social Welfare and a double BA in Chemistry & Nanoscience and Social Welfare from Ewha Womans University.

Dr Seo is not currently accepting new PhD students.