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Family Background, Gender and Educational Attainment in Urban China*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

C. Montgomery Broaded  and
Chongshun Liu
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Extract

Substantial gender imbalances in Chinese higher education and in the urban occupational structure are widely recognized.1 Women comprise only about one–third of students in colleges and universities, and they tend to be concentrated in particular types of institutions, such as teacher training colleges, and departments such as humanities, while men predominate in the scientific and engineering fields that have served as the primary avenues for upward occupational and political mobility. In the urban workforce, men are overrepresented in state–run factories and in positions of authority and expertise generally, while women are overrepresented in the collective sector, medium and light industry, and in the lower clerical and service sectors. These circumstances are the result of pervasive societal sorting processes which begin much earlier in life than sitting for the college entrance exams or entering the labour force, and which channel girls and boys towards different if partially overlapping futures. The research we report here on the determinants of educational attainment at the senior high school level helps to shed light on processes of gender differentiation and stratification in urban China.

Type
Research Article
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 145 , March 1996 , pp. 53 - 86
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 1996

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References

1 See Martin, Whyte and William, Parish, Urban Life in Contemporary China(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Beverly Hooper, “Gender and education,” in Irving Epstein (ed.), Chinese Education: Problems, Policies, and Prospects(New York&London: Garland Publishing, 1991).Google Scholar

2 Many other influences, such as socialization patterns within families and mass media exposure, are undoubtedly important parts of the equation, but are beyond the scope of the current inquiry.

3 For a detailed discussion of the complexities of Chinese educational structure at the secondary level, see Jurgen Henze, The formal education system and modernization: an analysis of developments since 1978,” in Ruth Hayhoe (ed.), Education and Modernization: The Chinese Experience(Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1992), pp. 103–139; Stig, Thogersen, "Editors Introduction" to a special issue on vocational and technical secondary school education in China, in Chinese Education, Vol. 24, No. 3Google Scholar

4 Stanley Rosen, “New directions in secondary education,” in Ruth Hayhoe (ed.), Contemporary Chinese Education(Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1984), pp. 65–92; Jonathan Unger, Education Under Mao: Class and Competition in Canton Schools(New York: Columbia University Press, 1982); Heidi Ross, “The crisis in Chinese secondary schooling,” in Epstein, Chinese Education,pp. 66–108.

5 In a very useful research project in Yantai, Th0gersen adopted a retrospective approach, selecting a sample of students already enrolled in several academic and vocational senior high schools and examining their family backgrounds. Since we begin with a sample of students that represents at least a substantial proportion of the range of junior high school experiences in Wuhan, and then follow them across the transition to senior high school, we can more directly assess the relative weight of factors influencing students aspirations and actual high school placements. See Stig Th0gersen, “Chinas senior middle schools in a social perspective: a survey of Yantai district, Shandong province,” The China Quarterly,No. 107 (March 1987), pp. 72–100.

6 We do not know the post–graduation circumstances of 84 of our respondents, but we do know their high school entrance examination scores. Fully two–thirds of those studentt scored more than one standard deviation below the mean for admission to a regular academic high school (that is, below 432 points). Most of them would have enrolled in vocational high schools or technical schools, or would have left the school system altogether to seek work. Thus, if the placement information on these students were available to us, the final distribution would have been closer to 47% in academic schools, 44% in vocational schools and 9% employed or seeking work. This suggests that our sample is skewed somewhat upward. Interviews with Wuhan Municipal Education Commission officials in mid–1990 indicated that about 40% of all junior high graduates continued into academic senior high schools, another 40% entered vocational schools, and about 20% left the school system.

7 Because of ability grouping at the senior high level, some very able students may decide to attend regular academic schools rather than keypoint schools because they can expect to be assigned to a high ability class–group and hence receive good college entrance exam preparation in a school that is more convenient for them to attend.

8 Most of the difference in boys and girls entrance exam scores is probably due to boys higher scores on the mathematics and sciences portions of the test. Our data on students grades in junior high school show boys and girls to be nearly equal in language and history courses, but boys to have somewhat higher grades than girls in mathematics and science.

9 Emily Honig and Gail Hershatter, Personal Voices: Chinese Women in the 1980s(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988). See also several of the articles translated in a special issue on women, education, and employment in Chinese Education,Vol. 22, No. 2 (Summer 1989).

10 This question was intended to mimic the process in which students express their high school enrolment preferences (tian zhiyuan)in conjunction with sitting for the entrance exams.

11 Reform of Chinas Educational Structure – Decision of the CPC Central Committee(Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1985).

12 Less than 2% of the traditional college age cohort is enrolled in “regular" colleges and universities. But as a reviewer pointed out to us, the proportion may be closer to 3.5% if one includes the many recent high school graduates admitted to adult higher education (such as TV University programmes). See, for example, statistics provided in Zhongguo jiaoyu manjian 1991 (China Education Yearbook 1991)(Beijing: Renmin jiaoyu chubanshe, 1991), pp. 94–95. 61

13 This result is completely consistent with Th0gersens observations among his respondents in Yantai.

14 Azizur Rahman Kahn et al.,"Household income and its distribution in China,” The China Quarterly,No. 132 (December 1992), pp. 1029–61

15 Mens levels of education in China are higher than womens. Fathers of our respondents are distributed as follows: 30% junior high school or less, 37% some kind of senior high schooling and 33% college or higher specialized training. For mothers the respective figures are 50%, 37% and 14%. These distributions, which show educational attainments among the parents of our respondents to be higher than the urban population in general, can be taken as further indirect evidence that our sample of schools and class–groups is skewed somewhat upward. Put differently, the lowest quality schools, and/or the lowest ability class–groups are not included or underrepresented in our sample.

16 See n. 5 above.

17 These are admittedly crude categories. We experienced some difficulty, in particular, in discerning the level and the span of authority of parents identified as cadres. The category includes both high level functionaries (factory directors, officials in the municipal and provincial government and CCP structure) as well as petty officials with very narrow spans of authority in low level bureaus.

18 These figures are averages of the separate distributions of fathers and mothers occupations.

19 For fathers, the association between education level and occupation is 37, as measured by Somers D. For mothers, the association is even higher, at 49.

20 Maths, science, Chinese, history, English and geography. Grading practices across schools probably vary somewhat, but the curriculum is relatively standardized and all schools assign grades on a 100–point scale. We do not believe that the variation in grading practices is large enough to affect our substantive conclusions.

21 It is likely that some of the influence runs in the other direction, with lower or higher levels of aspiration contributing to lower or higher academic achievements.

22 Rosen, “New directions in secondary education"; Unger, Education Under Mao,pp. 208–213.

23 We computed measures of association between ability group level and aspirations for each quartile of the grade average distribution separately. Pearsons r was 30 in the first (lowest) quartile, 36 in the second, 49 in the third and 32 in the fourth quartile, with all coefficients significant at the 01 level or better.

24 They also have strong direct effects on students grades and on their placement in higher or lower ability groups (tables not shown here).

25 In analyses not shown in this article, we separately crosstabulated fathers education and mothers education with students high school placements. Pearsons r for the influence of fathers education alone was 24 (p < 00001);when we split the table by sex, Pearsons r for the girls table was 30 (p< 00001), while for the boys table it was 18 (p< 01). Pearsons r for the influence of mothers education alone was 20 (p <.00001). When we split the table by sex and recalculated our measure of association, Pearsons r was 24 (p <.001) for the girls table and 17 (p<.01) for the boys table.

26 Using our three levels of attainment, parents educational levels are the same in 52% of the cases, fathers have a higher level in 39% of cases and mothers have a higher level in 9% of cases.

27 In order to be certain that the observed effect of fathers political status was not simply an artifact of differences in the educational levels of Party and non–Party fathers, we controlled for fathers educational level. The effect of Party affiliation is found at all levels of fathers education, but is somewhat weaker at the highest educational levels.

28 For boys, Pearsons r for the association between mothers political status and high school enrolment is very weak, at 04, and does not achieve statistical significance. For girls, Pearsons r is 22 (p< 001).

29 These trends are reflected in national statistics as well. In 1991, vocational school enrolments comprised nearly 47% of total senior secondary enrolments. See “Quarterly Chronicle and Documentation,” The China Quarterly,No. 130 (June 1992), p. 471