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The Elastic Ceiling: Gender and Professional Career in Chinese Courts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Chunyan Zheng ,
Jiahui Ai  and
Sida Liu
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Abstract

Since the 1990s, the number of women in Chinese courts has been increasing steadily. Many women judges have risen to mid-level leadership positions, such as division chiefs and vice-chiefs, in the judicial bureaucracy. However, it remains difficult for women to be promoted to high-level leadership positions, such as vice-presidents and presidents. What explains the stratified patterns of career mobility for women in Chinese courts? In this article, we argue that two social processes are at work in shaping the structural patterns of gender inequality: dual-track promotion and reverse attrition. Dual-track promotion is dominated by a masculine and corrupt judicial culture on the political track that prevents women from obtaining high-level promotions, but still allows them to rise to mid-level leadership positions on the professional track based on their expertise and work performance. Reverse attrition enables women to take vacant mid-level positions left by men who exit the judiciary to pursue other careers. Taken together, the vertical and horizontal mobility of judges in their career development presents a processual logic to gender inequality and shapes women's structural positions in Chinese courts, a phenomenon that we term the “elastic ceiling.”

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Articles
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Law & Society Review , Volume 51 , Issue 1 , March 2017 , pp. 168 - 199
Copyright
© 2017 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

The authors thank Swethaa Ballakrishnen, Ira Belkin, Hae Yeon Choo, Jerome A. Cohen, Thomas Kellogg, Ji Li, Ling Li, Benjamin L. Liebman, Neysun Mahboubi, Margaret K. Lewis, Carl Minzner, Xiaolong Peng, Debra Schleef, Gay W. Seidman, Hilary Sommerlad, Lillian Hsiao-Ling Su, Juan Wang, Chi Yin, and anonymous reviewers of the Law & Society Review for their helpful comments, as well as our students, especially Wei Xing, for their excellent research assistance during fieldwork.

The three authors contributed equally to the article.

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