The economics of gender in China: Women, work and the glass ceiling

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

1 The proliferation of this unsubstantiated claim is not without foundation. At the national level, the “Fourteenth Five-Year Plan” and the “2035 Long-Term Goal Outline” which were announced by the NPC (the National People’s Congress) in 2021 explicitly stated that the legal retirement age should be gradually delayed following the principles of “small-step adjustment, flexible implementation, classified promotion, and overall planning.” For details on the national development guidelines, see the official website of the Chinese government at https://www.gov.cn/xinwen/2021-03/13/content_5592681.htm

2 Guanxi is a long-standing cultural custom in China that uses social networks or interpersonal relationships to make exchanges or achieve specific objectives.

3 During the planned economy, danwei was strongly political. Even after the Economic Reform that started in 1978, danwei is still considered as the workplace that is tied to the government. What should be noted here is that danwei is a strictly hierarchical system that affects women at work to a great extent.

4 Bulger further points out that as younger generations are becoming less dependent on the government, they will be the main force to challenge gender inequality and bring gradual improvement for women in the Chinese workplace.

5 Factors such as Confucianism, centralized imperial bureaucracy, and the role of the family in ancient Chinese society contributed to the lack of strict separation between the public and private spheres. Additionally, following the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the country adopted a production-oriented approach that prioritized productivity over family matters. During this period, the work-family relationship was dominated by the socialist state, further blurring the boundaries between work and family. This blurred boundary between work and family is also seen as one of the factors that causes work-family conflict in China. For instance, in their study that analyzed multi-source data collected from 248 Hong Kong employee and their spouses, Luk and Shaffer (2005) state that “blurred boundaries between family and work for Chinese enhance the likelihood that high commitment to work in terms time and/or expectations will affect both WIF (work interference with family) and FIW (family interference with work)” (p. 492).

6 As early as 1999, some Western scholars have applied the model of the work-family interface that was first developed by Front, Russel, and Cooper in the study of work-family relationships in Hong Kong. See Samuel Aryee, Vivienne Luk, and Dail Fields, “A Cross-Cultural Test of a Model of the Work-Family Interface,” in Journal of Management, 25(4), 491–511.

7 As stated in the forward by Deborah Davis, the metaphor of the glass ceiling has long been employed to explain persistent gender differentials in leadership at work (p. vii).

Additional information

Funding

This book review has been sponsored by Huaqiao University Start-up Research Fund (grant number 23SKBS002) and Guangdong Planning Office of Philosophy and Social Science (grant number GD21YWW01).

Notes on contributors

Xuliang Sun

Xuliang SUN received his Ph. D. from the Department of History, University of Macau, and is currently working at the College of International Relations, Huaqiao University. His research interests include the history of Sino-Western cultural interaction, the history of the Catholic Church in China, women and Catholicism in China.

Shuping Chen

Shuping CHEN received her Ph. D. from the Department of English, University of Macau, and is currently working at the College of Foreign Languages, Huaqiao University. Her research interests include English literature and Western literary theories.