Childcare, Household Composition, Muslim Ethnicity, and Off-Farm Work in Rural China

ABSTRACT

This study explores how religious and ethnic norms and gender relations interact across the domestic and public spheres of work in rural China's minority-concentrated regions. It focuses on the roles that childcare and household composition play in the employment decisions of prime-age married individuals of Muslim and non-Muslim ethnicity. Using the 2012 China Household Ethnicity Survey (CHES), the study finds that children generally decrease women's likelihood of employment outside the home and increase men's. The gender gap in the probability of off-farm employment is larger for those of Muslim ethnicity. Non-Muslim parents of sons are more likely to migrate for employment than parents of daughters. The presence of women of grandparent age (46–70) universally facilitates labor migration. Men of grandparent age tend to increase only the probability that non-Muslim parents migrate for employment. Additional adult male household members reduce the likelihood that women of Muslim ethnicity have off-farm employment.

KEYWORDS:

• Children
• economics of the family
• ethnicity
• household behavior
• migrant labor
• paid work

JEL Codes:

• D13
• J13
• J15

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We gratefully acknowledge both the thoughtful comments on an early draft provided by Ang Sun at the Workshop on Care Economy, Gender, and Inclusive Growth in China held at the National School of Development, Peking University, May 27–28, 2016 and the comments and feedback provided by the journal's referees and guest editors.

SUPPLEMENTAL DATA

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/13545701.2017.1407032.

Notes

1 In many jurisdictions around the world, individuals self-identify as being a member of an ethnic minority group. In contrast, in China, ethnic minority status is assigned at birth, recorded on official identity documents, and, in almost all cases, fixed throughout one's life (Maurer-Fazio and Hasmath 2015).

2 As Ebru Kongar, Jennifer C. Olmsted, and Elora Shehabuddin (2014) point out, there are very complex relationships between the economic, political, cultural, and religious spheres that affect people's lives, and it is critical to take intersectionality, historical context, and structural constraints into account when considering women's and men's experiences by religion and ethnicity.

3 Maurer-Fazio (2012), using Internet job boards in six large Chinese cities, found that college-educated Uyghur women had to put in almost twice as many applications as their equally qualified Han counterparts to obtain the same number of interview callbacks.

4 In Hui areas, Hui women typically wear headscarves and Hui men wear white caps. Some family names also signal a strong likelihood of being Hui (Gustafsson and Ding 2014).

5 News accounts report rural bride prices in China vary over time and place: 30,000 RMB in 1999 (Sun 2016), 100,000 RMB in 2014 (Zhang 2014), and 200,000 RMB in 2015 (Wang 2015).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sai Ding

Sai Ding is Dean and Professor in the Department of Ethnic Economics at the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and Adjunct Faculty Member at the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota. Her research focuses on China's ethnic economic issues, and her work has been published in a variety of journals, including Review of Income and Wealth, China Economic Review, China Quarterly, Social Indicators Research, Review of Black Political Economy, and Feminist Economics.

Xiao-yuan Dong

Xiao-yuan Dong is Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Winnipeg, Canada and Adjunct Professor at the National School of Development, Peking University, China. She has served on the board of directors of the International Association of Feminist Economics and is an Associate Editor of Feminist Economics. Her research focuses on China's economic development, with an emphasis on labor and gender issues. Her work has been published in a variety of journals, including Journal of Political Economy, Journal of Development Economics, Journal of Comparative Economics, World Development, Economic Development and Cultural Change, and Feminist Economics.

Margaret Maurer-Fazio

Margaret Maurer-Fazio is the Betty Doran Stangle Professor of Applied Economics at Bates College and Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA). She has served on the editorial boards of the China Economic Review, the Journal of Contemporary China, and Eurasian Geography and Economics and on the advisory board of the Chinese Women Economists Network. She publishes in both economic and China journals such as the Journal of Human Resources, the China Journal, the Journal of Comparative Economics, China Economic Review, International Journal of Manpower, Feminist Economics, and the Journal of Contemporary China.