Nancy E. Riley

Gender Inequality in Urban China: Education and Employment

The results of the 1987 1% Sample Survey in China revealed that 88% of older women were illiterate but that only 15% of rural females aged 15-19 years were illiterate. In urban areas illiteracy was 29% and 67% among older men and women respectively and 2.3% and 6% among younger men and women. Female primary school enrollment increased from about 30% in the early 1950s to 40-45% in the late 1980s and thereafter. Female high school enrollment increased from 25% to 40%. By the 1980s female university enrollment was about 33%. Attainment of a primary education for females increased from 30% in 1955 to 94% by 1983. Secondary school attainment increased until about 1966-72. During 1973-76 attainment rates increased but after 1978 many junior high school students went on to technical schools. In the 1980s 9% of males and 5% of females continued with a university education compared to 33% before 1964. The determinants of enrollment by sex were examined in a logit analysis. The results showed that having a brother reduced the likelihood of enrollment but the impact was diminished by fathers occupation. The higher educational status of the father increased the chances of high school enrollment. Enrollment for boys increased from 56% for sons of secondary school graduates (fathers) to 79% for sons of university graduates (fathers). Gender differences were apparent. Only 35% of daughters compared to 42% of sons were likely to be enrolled in secondary schools when fathers had only a primary education. Higher enrollment rates for sons and daughters were found among those with fathers engaged in government administration or professional positions. The impact of fathers occupation was strongest on female enrollment in secondary school. The chances of females being in the labor force were affected most by female educational attainment. A junior high graduate was more likely to be employed and a high school graduate was even more likely to be employed. Older women were less likely to be employed but more likely to be employed if they had higher educational attainment. 44% of women worked in industry transport and construction in low priority industries such as paper textiles printing and communications. The chances of being a female enterprise head increased with increasing female age. Education and age had different effects on occupational attainment for men as compared to women.

Interwoven Lives: Parents, Marriage, and Guanxi in China.

In China people rely heavily on the use of interpersonal ties (guanxi) to acquire scarce goods and services. Children often rely on parents guanxi for help in achieving school or career goals. This article examines changes in the role of parents in marriage decisions using the In-Depth Fertility Survey Phase II (hereafter IDFS) which was conducted in 1987 by the State Statistical Bureau (Beijing). The survey included approximately 5000 respondents in each of the 6 provinces of Liaoning Shandong Beijing Guangdong Guizhou and Gansu (n = 31914). All respondents were ever-married women between the ages of 15 and 50. In addition data were collected in Beijing during 1986-87. The focus of that project was marriage and the role of parents in young womens lives. Qualitative data were also collected from focus groups and semistructured interviews with 23 women and quantitative data from 700 unmarried and married women between the ages of 20 and 35 using a standard questionnaire. The proportion of women in marriages in which their parents were not involved was quite high (over 50%) in Beijing but that city stood apart from the other 5 provinces where the proportion was much lower (in all others it was less than 35%). The rate of arranged marriage was especially low in Beijing Guangdong and Liaoning but higher in Shandong Guizhou and highest in Gansu. In Beijing parents often chose friends for their daughters both female and male. Out of 248 married respondents nearly 45% had received an introduction to a potential spouse from their parents. The relationship between marriage and the guanxi system lies in the important role of the family in guanxi networks. Recent economic changes have made resources exchanged sold or bought in a market economy more accessible to Chinese citizens. Cash could replace guanxi in parts of the economy and the reduction of some shortages has also been important.

Challenging Demography: Contributions from Feminist Theory

Demography as a field has made limited progress in its work on understanding the role of gender in demographic change for several reasons. This paper explores the theoretical, methodological, and political influences on this understanding. For example, demography can be seen as a field that because of its stability and resources, has not been forced into the “crises” that might force it to question its assumptions and methodologies; it has not developed a tradition of reflexivity, one which might address alternative approaches to this and other issues, such as the political nature of population work. In addition, partly because of a reliance on certain kinds of methodological approaches, demographers tend to use measures of gender that reflect individual characteristics rather than those that allow understanding of gender at a larger level, or provide information beyond the individual. The result is a particular approach to gender within demographic studies. Feminist theoretical approaches to gender could contribute to the field and the study of population change in general in several key ways.

American adoptions of Chinese girls: The socio-political matrices of individual decisions

Abstract Although operating on an individual level, adoption may also be seen as organized and shaped by larger social institutions such as the state. This paper explores how adoption of Chinese girls by Americans is conditioned by the ideologies of motherhood, family, gender and adoption in these two societies. When viewed from this perspective, it is easier to understand how the differences between China and the United States—differences that range from access to resources to different types of state control to differences in the ideologies of motherhood—are the backdrop to the individual decisions about relinquishing or adopting a daughter that parents in either society make.

Demography of Gender

Examining the research on gender in demography makes clear that we work in a much more hopeful environment than existed just 10 years ago. We have accumulated a rich store of information on gender’s connection to processes surrounding fertility and mortality. Perhaps the most positive sign is the sheer volume of work dealing with gender, and the ways that most demographers recognize gender’s importance in all social processes. Gaps do remain in our understanding of gender and demographic behavior. It may be that the tools of demography are not geared to understanding the complexities of gender; more data may not necessarily give us more answers. But these gaps, then, are linked to the theoretical and methodological weaknesses in the field generally and the ways that much of the work on gender continues to follow the field instead of “imagining” something different (Dixon-Mueller and Germain 2000; see also Kertzer and Fricke 1997 and McNicoll 1992 on some of demography’s other weaknesses).

Good Mothering in China: Effects of Migration, Low Fertility, and Birth Constraints

We often assume that lower fertility is linked to greater power and status for women; the link might be explained causally, in both directions: when women have fewer children, they have more space in their lives for education and careers. Or when women spend more time in school or focusing on their careers, they are less likely to have many children. But when we look at societies with low fertility, we do not see that women are necessarily more equal to men than in other societies. Lower fertility regimes just as often become a new phase of a long-standing pattern of gender inequality. This chapter uses China as an example of a society with low fertility (and, here, government-promoted increase in women’s labor force participation) that allows us to see how low fertility can exist without much change in patterns of gender inequality.

Measuring Gender in the Context of Demographic Change

In this chapter we focus on the definition and measurement of gender in demographic research. We start by reviewing the history of efforts to bring gender into demographic analyses and the challenges that researchers have faced in this endeavor. We then investigate different approaches to measuring gender and its relationships to demographic outcomes, and look at both quantitative and qualitative methodologies. We argue that while demography now recognizes the importance of gender in any demographic analysis, we are still far from capturing the full effects of gender; especially difficult has been capturing the influence of gender operating at the community or societal levels.

Women, Biopower and the Making of Demographic Knowledge: India’s Demographic and Health Survey

Control of population–control both of the numbers of people and of their actions–is vital to modern development. Demography, with its disciplinary interest in population data collection and commitment to population control, legitimizes and reinforces development discourse with the “facticity” of its numbers. Women are at the center of these efforts. We analyze the Demographic and Health Survey (part of a group of surveys that can be considered at the center of demographic knowledge of non-industrialized countries) in order to examine the discourse of population control in India and other Third World countries. In India, population control and management has long been the goal of governing powers, colonial and Indian; the DHS is only the most recent intervention in this population management project. We deconstruct the DHS and examine the historical and epistemological background of that survey project to demonstrate and illuminate the connection between demography and development. We argue that questionnaire methodology and its related epistemology are connected to a particular developmentalist ideology and practice, one that relies on neoliberal ideology with its rhetoric of individual choice and free market that works to manage and control women’s bodies and lives in the name of necessary demographic change.

Michelle Murphy. Seizing the Means of Reproduction: Entanglements of Feminism, Health, and Technoscience

Michelle Murphys Seizing the Means of Reproduction is a complex, insightful book that explores and elaborates a feminist perspective of technoscience. She explores the complicated “entanglements” ...

Urban as Paradise: Understanding the Urban/Rural Divide

“Leaving the rural area is really important for girls,” insisted Chanquan. Over the course of several hours of interviews with me, Chanquan elaborated on her efforts to get to the city and to find a way to stay there permanently. As a single woman, she saw one after another route to her goal close down. As a poor villager, she was unable to access an educational route out. She had not been hired into a job that might give her an urban hukou. And she was about ready to marry a man who also had a rural hukou. At some points in her conversations, she was frustrated and sad about her failures along the way, and at other points, showed herself to be absolutely committed to achieving her goal of urban residence. She spoke with passion and resolve.