Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-xbtfd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-08T04:29:15.618Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Income, Work Preferences and Gender Roles among Parents of Infants in Urban China: A Mixed Method Study from Nanjing*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 December 2010

Sung won Kim ,
Vanessa L. Fong ,
Hirokazu Yoshikawa ,
Niobe Way ,
Xinyin Chen ,
Huihua Deng  and
Zuhong Lu
Vanessa L. Fong
Affiliation:
Harvard University. Email: [email protected](corresponding author).
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article explores the relationship between gender and income inequality within and across households in an urban Chinese sample by looking at survey data from 381 married couples with infants born in a Nanjing hospital between 2006 and 2007 and in-depth interviews with a subsample of 80 of these couples. We explore the relationship between family income and differences between husbands’ and wives’ work preferences. A couple-level quantitative analysis shows that in lower-income families, husbands were more likely than their wives to prefer career advancement and low stress at work, and wives were more likely than their husbands to prefer state jobs. Our analyses of the qualitative subsample show that, even though high-income husbands and wives are more likely to share similar work preferences, the household division of roles within their marriages is still gendered along traditional lines, as it is in the marriages of low-income couples.

Type
Articles
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 204 , December 2010 , pp. 939 - 959
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Hanser, Amy, “The Chinese enterprising self: young, educated urbanites and the search for work,” in Link, Perry E., Madsen, Richard P. and Pickowicz, Paul G. (eds.), Popular China: Unofficial Culture in a Globalizing Society (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), pp. 189–206.Google Scholar

2 Unified state assignment of jobs stopped for those entering university in 1988, and by 1993, 70% of graduates found their own jobs. By 1995, more than half of the men had moved into the private sector whereas in 1990, most men and women were working in the state sector. See Davis, Deborah S., “Self-employment in Shanghai: a research note,” The China Quarterly, No. 157 (1999), pp. 29–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 See, for example, Hau, Siu C. and Ngo, Hang-yue, “Gender differences in job attribute preferences and job choice of university students in China,” Journal of Applied Business Research, Vol. 18, No. 2 (2002), pp. 15–27;Google ScholarJames, Laura, “United by gender or divided by class? Women's work orientations and labour market behavior,” Gender, Work & Organization, Vol. 15, No. 4 (2008), pp. 394–412.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

4 See Bian, Yanjie, “Chinese social stratification and social mobility,” Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 28, No. 1 (2002), pp. 91–116.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 The state withdrew as the market became more influential in China with the economic reforms. In Ong, Aihwa, Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, this is called “graduated sovereignty,” in which the government flexibly adjusts its political space to the dictates of the global capital. Others describe not only the diminished role of the state but also the outright rejection of the values of the 1940s–70s, which is erased through endorsement of capitalist values in retail stores, or absence of sites which speak of China's modern history in Shenzhen's miniature nationscape. See Hanser, Amy, Service Encounters: Class, Gender, and the Market for Social Distinction in Urban China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008);Google ScholarAnagnost, Ann, “The nationscape,” in National Past-Times: Narrative, Representation, and Power in Modern China (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), pp. 161–75.Google Scholar

6 Davis, Deborah S. and Sensenbrenner, Julia S., “Commercializing childhood: parental purchases for Shanghai's only child,” in Davis, Deborah S. (ed.), The Consumer Revolution in Urban China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000)Google Scholar argue that the economic reforms have altered the power balance between family and state: income became more important than political connections in obtaining material benefits.

7 Hanser, “The Chinese enterprising self”; Hoffman, Lisa M., “Post-Mao professionalism: self-enterprise and patriotism,” in Zhang, Li and Ong, Aihwa (eds.), Privatizing China: Socialism from Afar (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), pp. 168–81.Google Scholar

8 For instance, Dawis, René V. and Lofquist, Lloyd H., A Psychological Theory of Work Adjustment: An Individual-Differences Model and its Applications (Minneapolis, MD: University of Minnesota Press, 1984)Google Scholar and Super, Donald E., Manual, Work Values Inventory (Boston: Houghton-Miffin, 1970)Google Scholar conceived of work values as needs whereas Pryor, Robert, “In search of a concept: work values,” Vocational Guidance Quarterly, Vol. 27, No. 3 (1979), pp. 250–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar, defined them as individual work aspect preferences regardless of what they think should be done.

9 Among many others, see Kohn, Melvin L., Class and Conformity: A Study in Values, with a Reassessment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977);Google ScholarKusserow, Adrie, American Individualisms: Child Rearing and Social Class in Three Neighborhoods (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004);CrossRefGoogle ScholarFong, Vanessa L., “Parent-child communication problems and the perceived inadequacies of Chinese only children,” Ethos, Vol. 35, No. 1 (2007), pp. 85–127.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 Cultural models of gender were ambivalent because of the tension between the socialist state and capitalism. See Evans, Harriet, “Past, perfect or imperfect: changing images of the Ideal Wife,” in Brownell, Susan and Wasserstrom, Jeffrey N. (eds.), Chinese Femininities, Chinese Masculinities: A Reader (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), pp. 335–60;CrossRefGoogle ScholarHonig, Emily and Hershatter, Gail, Personal Voices: Chinese Women in the 1980's (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988);Google ScholarGottschang, Suzanne, “The consuming mother: infant feeding and feminine body in China,” in Chen, Nancy N. (ed.), China Urban: Ethnographies of Contemporary Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), pp. 89–103.CrossRefGoogle Scholar “Cultural models” are defined as meaning/belief systems of individuals, which grow from their experiences. See Strauss, Claudia and Quinn, Naomi, A Cognitive Theory of Cultural Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997);Google ScholarD'Andrade, Roy G. and Strauss, Claudia, Human Motives and Cultural Models (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 The glamorous “modern housewife,” a capitalist re-creation of the traditional xianqi liangmu model, was promoted in the magazine market and public discourse. See Hooper, Beverly, “‘Flower vase and housewife’: women and consumerism in post-Mao China,” in Sen, Krishna and Stivens, Maila (eds.), Gender and Power in Affluent Asia (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 167–93.Google Scholar

12 Women models of success were depicted mainly as wives even if they were successful workplace achievers. See Evans, Harriet, Women and Sexuality in China: Female Sexuality and Gender since 1949 (New York: Continuum, 1997), pp. 112–43.Google Scholar

13 Wolf, Margery, Revolution Postponed: Women in Contemporary China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985), p. 74.Google Scholar

14 Julia Sensenbrenner, “Rust in the iron rice bowl,” unpublished PhD dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, 1996.

15 Milwertz, Cecilia N., “The cultural assumption of virtuous wife and good mother,” in Accepting Population Control: Urban Chinese Women and the One-Child Family Policy (Richmond: Curzon, 1997), pp. 150–82.Google Scholar

16 Fisher, Cynthia D. and Yuan, Xue Y.,“What motivates employees? A comparison of US and Chinese responses,” International Journal of Human Resource Management, Vol. 9, No. 3 (1998), pp. 516–28;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Hau and Ngo, “Gender differences in job attribute preferences,” pp. 15–27.

17 Opportunities to “get rich quickly” emerged as risk-taking at the cost of job security was rewarded in the private sector. Andrew Morris, “‘I believe you can fly’: basketball culture in post-colonialist China,” in Link, Madsen and Pickowicz, Popular China, pp. 9–38, compared success in the market economy to the life goal of a slam dunk in the opponents’ face during a basketball game, which entails high risks and high rewards.

18 Lin, Nan, “Understanding the social inequality system and family and household dynamics in China,” in Entwistle, Barbara and Henderson, Gail (eds.), Re-Drawing Boundaries: Work, Households, and Gender in China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), pp. 284–94.Google Scholar

19 Although households tended to specialize instead of diversifying (so household members tended to work in the same broad occupational category and employment sector), household members co-ordinated their income-earning activities. See Barbara Entwistle, Susan E. Short, Zhai Fenying and Ma Linmao, “Household economies in transitional times,” in Entwistle and Henderson, Re-Drawing Boundaries, pp. 261–83. For a description of the “one-family two-systems” strategy, see Davis, Deborah, “Job mobility in post-Mao cities: increases on the margins,” The China Quarterly, No. 132 (1992), pp. 1062–85;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Davis, “Self-employment in Shanghai”; Lee, Ching K., “From organized dependence to disorganized despotism: changing labour regimes in Chinese factories,” The China Quarterly, No. 157 (1999), pp. 44–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20 Whyte, Martin K., “Sexual inequality under socialism: the Chinese case in perspective,” in Watson, James L. (ed.), Class and Social Stratification (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 198–238.Google Scholar

21 Yanjie Bian, John R. Logan and Xiaoling Shu, “Wage and job inequalities in the working lives of men and women in Tianjin,” in Entwistle and Henderson, Re-Drawing Boundaries, pp. 111–33.

22 Women were offered lower wages and benefits in otherwise equivalent jobs, and discriminated against because their employers did not want to pay for the costs of maternity leave and care. See Robinson, Jean C., “Of women and washing machines: employment, housework, and the reproduction of motherhood in socialist China,” The China Quarterly, No. 101 (1985), pp. 32–57;CrossRefGoogle ScholarChen, Lanyan, Gender and Chinese Development: Towards an Equitable Society (London: Routledge, 2008);Google ScholarKerr, Joanna, Delahanty, Julie and Humpage, Kate, Gender and Jobs in China's New Economy (Ottawa: North-South Institute, 1996);Google ScholarRosen, Stanley, “Value change among post-Mao youth: the evidence from survey data,” in Link, Perry E., Madsen, Richard and Pickowicz, Paul (eds.), Unofficial China: Popular Culture and Thought in the People's Republic (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1989), pp. 193–216.Google Scholar

23 Some formerly low-paying, female-dominated sectors of the economy became male-dominated once they became higher-paying. See Shu, Xiaoling, Zhu, Yifei and Zhang, Zhanxin, “Global economy and gender inequalities: the case of the urban Chinese labor market,” Social Science Quarterly, Vol. 88, No. 5 (2007), pp. 1307–32;CrossRefGoogle ScholarZheng, Wang, “Gender, employment, and women's resistance,” in Perry, Elizabeth J. and Selden, Mark (eds.), Chinese Society: Change, Conflict, and Resistance (London: Routledge, 2000);Google ScholarWest, Jackie, Women of China: Economic and Social Transformation (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1999).CrossRefGoogle Scholar For example, when the private sector was low-paying in the 1980s, women were more likely to be self-employed than men; when the private sector became higher-paying, the reverse became true. See Davis, “Self-employment in Shanghai.”

24 Cohen, Philip and Wang, Feng, “Market and gender pay equity: have Chinese reforms narrowed the gap?” in Davis, Deborah and Wang, Feng (eds.), Creating Wealth and Poverty in Post-socialist China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), pp. 35–51.Google Scholar

25 Fisher and Yuan, “What motivates employees?”; Hau and Ngo, “Gender differences in job attribute preferences.”

26 Dewe, Phillip. J., “Applying the concept of appraisal to work stressors: some exploratory analysis,” Human Relations, Vol. 45, No. 2 (1992), pp. 143–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

27 Ganster, Daniel C. and Schaubroeck, John, “Work stress and employee health,” Journal of Management, Vol. 17, No. 2 (1991), pp. 235–71;CrossRefGoogle ScholarKarasek, Robert A., “Job demands, job decision latitude, and mental strain: implications for job redesign,” Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 24, No. 2 (1979), pp. 285–308.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

28 Frone, Michael R., Russell, Marcia and Cooper, M. L., “Antecedents and outcomes of work-family conflict: testing a model of the work-family interface,” Journal of Applied Psychology, Vol. 77, No. 1 (1992), pp. 65–78.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

29 Choi, Jaepil, “Work and family demands and life stress among Chinese employees: the mediating effect of work–family conflict,” International Journal of Human Resource Management, Vol. 19, No. 5 (2008), pp. 878–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

30 Choi, Jaepil and Chen, Chao C., “Gender differences in perceived work demands, family demands, and life stress among married Chinese employees,” Management & Organization Review, Vol. 2, No. 2 (2006), pp. 209–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

31 Chinese cultural models of gender have continued to define the earning of income as primarily the responsibility of husbands. See Chen, Gender and Chinese Development; Evans, Women and Sexuality in China; Croll, Elisabeth J., Changing Identities of Chinese Women: Rhetoric, Experience, and Self-Perception in 20th Century China (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1995).Google Scholar

32 Bai, Limin, “Graduate unemployment: dilemmas and challenges in China's move to mass higher education,” The China Quarterly, No. 185 (2006), pp. 128–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

33 Hanser, “The Chinese enterprising self.”

34 See Lee, “From organized dependence to disorganized despotism” for a discussion on the transition from welfare paternalism to welfare commodification by the state, as state-owned enterprises lost their competitive advantage with the withdrawal of welfare.

35 Weldon, Elizabeth and Vanhonacker, Wilfried, “Operating a foreign-invested enterprise in China: challenges for managers and management researcher,” Journal of World Business, Vol. 34, No. 1 (1999), pp. 94–107.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

36 Cao, Yang and Nee, Victor G., “Comment: controversies and evidence in the market transition debate,” American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 105, No. 4 (2000), pp. 1175–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

37 Carr, Deborah, “Two paths to self-employment? Women's and men's self-employment in the United States, 1980,” Work & Occupations, Vol. 23, No. 1 (1996), pp. 26–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar found in an American sample that wives who were financially backed by their high-earning husbands were more likely to engage in self-employment. Our sample also shows correlations between family income and husband income (r = .30, p < .001).

38 Educational attainment and occupational status have become increasingly important for class mobility since the economic reforms in the 1980s, and family income is related to both. See Yanjie Bian, “Chinese social stratification and social mobility,” pp. 91–116.

39 James, “United by gender or divided by class?” pp. 394–412.

40 Huato, Julio and Zeno, Kathryn W., “Class, race, and the spousal income gap: the effects of family income, educational attainment, and race-ethnicity on the husband-wife income ratio in the United States, 1980, 1990, 2000,” American Behavioral Scientist, Vol. 53, No. 2 (2009), pp. 261–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar, also pointed to this gap in the literature.

41 See e.g. Entwistle and Henderson, Re-Drawing Boundaries; Gilmartin, Christina K., Hershatter, Gail, Rofel, Lisa and White, Tyrene, Engendering China: Women, Culture, and the State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994).Google Scholar

42 Zeng Yi, “Marriage patterns in contemporary China,” in Peng and Guo, The Changing Population of China, p. 92.

43 Wang, Feng, Boundaries and Categories: Rising Inequality in Post-Socialist Urban China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), p. 51.Google Scholar

44 Interviews, surveys, and observations are being collected across two cohorts of infants and adolescents and their parents, totaling 1,127 families, over a period of four years.

45 China Statistical Yearbook, 2007.

46 Nanjing Municipal Data, 2006.

47 Additionally, there was no gendered variation in income in cities of varying levels of foreign direct investment so Nanjing is comparable to other cities in this respect. See Shu, Zhu and Zhang, “Global economy and gender inequalities.”

48 49.3% girls and 50.7% boys.

49 The expense of the maternity-ward room (single-bed rooms compared to multiple-bed rooms) served as a proxy for income in sampling. We chose to study parents of young infants because income might matter even more as families experience extra financial burden to provide for the child while wives have more family duties and need to secure income as well.

50 The interviews were conducted by a group of native Chinese speakers, who were current or recently graduated graduate students at South East University in Nanjing, China and New York University in New York City.

51 Most of the couples in our sample had not experienced the lay-offs from state firms in the 1990s with economic restructuring which had disproportionally affected women. See Lin, Tan and Xizhe, Peng, “China's female population,” in Peng, Xizhe and Guo, Zhigang (eds.), The Changing Population of China (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 157.Google ScholarPubMed

52 This includes the bottom 14.2% of couples in our total sample.

53 These two items were positively correlated at p < .01. The correlation table of the work preference items is available upon request from the first author.

54 “Opportunities for advancement and promotion” was positively correlated with the other three items at p < .01.

55 Wives working in state-run units tend to value working in a state-owned firm (r = .12, p < .05) whereas wives working in the private sector tend to value running their own business (r = .17, p < .01). Thus wives’ engagement in the state or private sector reflects distinctive choices regarding their values.

56 Family income was negatively correlated with wives’ rating on benefits relating to child care (r = −.17, p < .01) and education (r = −.14, p < .01).

57 Family income was negatively correlated with security for husbands (r = −.13, p < .05).

58 From this point onward, each time we refer to husbands scoring higher, lower or similarly to their wives, we keep to this .5 standard deviation criterion.

59 Because of the low variation in terms of education levels found in couples, with most husbands and wives having completed a college degree in our sample as detailed in our methodology section, we did not include education as a prediction variable and only controlled for it.

60 See Li, Wanxian, Liu, Xinmei and Wan, Weiwu, “Demographic effects of work values and their management implications,” Journal of Business Ethics, Vol. 1, No. 4 (2007), pp. 875–85Google Scholar for further discussion on how age and education can affect job values in China.

61 Since the proportion of wives earning more than husbands was negligible, we ignored this category and performed binomial logistic regressions including the same predictors used in Table 2, with income difference as our outcome predictor divided into two categories: husbands earning more than their wives, and same-earning couples. We found that in higher income families, husbands were 11.2 times more likely to earn more than their wives (p < .01). Additionally, family income and husband-wife differential in earnings (in the direction husbands earning more than wives) were positively correlated (r = .19, p < .01).

62 Carr, “Two paths to self-employment?” pp. 26–53, also found this in an American sample.

63 Fong, Vanessa L., “China's one-child policy and the empowerment of urban daughters,” American Anthropologist, Vol. 104, No. 4 (2002), pp. 1098–1109.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

64 This was echoed by low-income couples although this high-income couple was chosen as an example for being more articulate.

65 Pimentel, Ellen E., “Gender ideology, household behavior, and backlash in urban China,” Journal of Family Issues, Vol. 27, No. 3 (2006), pp. 341–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar, argues that younger Chinese men participate more actively in domestic work although women's expectations for change are occurring at a faster rate, increasing their levels of dissatisfaction.

66 This is exactly what Hanser, “The Chinese enterprising self,” found in her sample of youth, who were confident in their ability to compete and wanted to test their “enterprising selves.”

67 This echoes the study of state-run versus private department stores in Harbin by Hanser, Service Encounters, which described the more competitive and stressful environment in the private stores.

68 Wives working in the state sector have an average income of 3,065.2 yuan with a standard deviation of 1,662.5 while self-employed wives have an average income of 5,235.7 yuan with a standard deviation of 4,128.8. It is necessary to point out that self-employed women were very heterogeneous, as they were in the most and least rewarded occupations, with little in between. See Arum, Richard, “Trends in male and female self-employment: growth in a new middle class or increasing marginalization of the labor force?” Research in Stratification and Mobility, Vol. 15 (1997), pp. 209–38.Google ScholarBudig, Michelle J. also argues that “the effects of family structure on women's propensity for self-employment significantly differ by occupational class” in “Intersections on the road to self-employment: gender, family and occupational class,” Social Forces, Vol. 84, No. 4 (2006), p. 2235.Google Scholar

69 Women who worked outside the public sector in privately owned enterprises were still denied formal contracts and social protection. See Chen, Gender and Chinese Development.

70 Entwistle and Henderson, Re-drawing Boundaries; Allison, Anne, Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).Google Scholar

71 Ngai, Pun, Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

72 See Rofel, Lisa, Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China After Socialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 102.CrossRefGoogle Scholar On issues concerning how maleness and manhood were conceived, see among numerous others, William Jankowiak, “Proper men and proper women: parental affection in the Chinese family,” in Brownell and Wasserstrom, Chinese Femininities, Chinese Masculinities, pp. 361–83; Louie, Kam, Theorising Chinese Masculinity: Society and Gender in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).Google Scholar