Wandering at the crossroads: gendered mobility aspirations in the study-to-work transition of Chinese graduates of Dutch universities

ABSTRACT

This paper discusses the gendered mobility aspirations, decisions and experiences of fresh Chinese graduates of Dutch universities. Our analysis draws on semi-structured interviews and the “story completion” method with 25 Chinese graduates of Dutch universities, complemented with three interviews with the parents of such students in China. We use three vignettes to show the complexity of gendered mobility aspirations in the study-to-work transition, an interphase between student mobility and skilled migration that has been less studied. Our analysis reveals how gender intersects with other social factors (such as sexuality, age, and race) and processes at individual, interpersonal and institutional levels to shape these graduates’ mobilities, careers and life aspirations. Our findings also highlight how multiple gender identities and roles across different life stages have an impact on students’ post-graduation mobility trajectories.

KEYWORDS:

• International student
• skilled migrants
• gender ideologies
• life phase
• China
• The Netherlands

Introduction

After they graduate, international students often have the opportunity to extend their stay by finding a job. This process of integrating (anew) into – that is, finding (new) positions in – the “destination” society has been less studied as the transition falls between the two policy and academic debates surrounding student mobility and labour migration (King 2002; Findlay et al. 2012). Yet, this transition period deserves closer attention as it is a phase of many important changes in the (usually) young people’s lives. Graduation does not only mean looking for work. It also represents a critical juncture when young migrants are (made) more aware of the gendered meanings of responsibilities in their transnational adult lives (King and Raghuram 2013). Departing from being a dependent child and their mostly privileged international student status, graduates need to chart their new lives, juggling their multiple and changing social positions vis-à-vis other members of their family and the societies in which they are embedded.

Drawing on our qualitative research conducted with 25 Chinese students in the Netherlands and three parents of such students in China, this paper reveals the gendered nature of decision-making processes of the young graduates. We problematize the common and simplistic assumption that young graduates make these decisions as rational individuals whose primary goal is to find a good job. We do so by examining how the multiple social positions – along the axes of gender, sexuality and age – of these graduates intersect to shape their work, life and mobility decisions. As these social identities and positions merge and sometimes contradict each other, young migrants face changing privileges, duties and expectations, which complicate the transnational and continuous process of future planning. We also underline the temporal dimension of this dynamic process. Through a life-phase perspective, we examine how gender (intersecting with other) ideologies, identities and roles change over one’s life course. These evolving gendered roles and identities in love, care, work and other relationships give rise, confine, extend or redirect migration plans. As such, young migrants find themselves in recurrent debates, indecision and deliberation over questions regarding integration: where to, what for, how and for how long? While our research was actor-centred, namely focused on the experiences and aspirations of our research participants, we demonstrate the need for a multi-scalar analysis to contextualize and make sense of these personal stories. Specifically, we draw on Barbara Risman’s three-level (individual, inter-relational and institutional) framework of gender analysis (2004) to map out the factors and processes that illustrate the role of gender in the study-to-work transition period.

Post-graduation mobility, gender, intersectionality and life course perspectives: an overview

While being a relatively small subset of student mobility research, there have been some insightful studies on international students’ post-graduation mobility. This line of work has advanced our knowledge of what drives graduates’ stay-or-return aspirations (Baruch, Budhwar, and Khatri 2007) and highlighted the variety across national contexts (Lee and Kim 2010). It usually adopts a push–pull perspective that identifies forces pushing graduates out of their homeland and pulling them to a longer stay in the country of education, and the other way round (Lin and Kingminghae 2017). Particularly relevant to our paper is the research that examines Chinese international students’ mobility plans. Researchers have identified career-related economic forces, such as income, promotion opportunity (Ley and Kobayashi 2005) and financial incentives provided by state talent schemes (Gribble 2008), as important and in some cases leading factors in driving graduates’ migration plans. Recognizing the limits of the economistic focus in understanding migration aspirations (Carling and Collins 2018), a body of research on diverse migration contexts has moved beyond merely economic or career calculations to highlight social (Mosneaga and Winther 2013), cultural (Bodycott and Lai 2012), political (Szelényi 2006) and environmental factors (Ley and Kobayashi 2005). Recent studies also acknowledge that young graduates are not free individual agents when making their migration plans. Their transnational ties with families, significant others, friends, etc., are influential in their mobility plans (Tu and Xie 2020). For example, Gao (2016) demonstrates that the responsibility of taking care of ageing parents at home is a decisive reason for returning or staying in geographically proximate places among Chinese graduates studying in Hong Kong. An array of pull and push factors are often at work, making the decision of “where next” less than clear and far from rational. Instead, these factors can be conflictual and lead to difficult negotiations and sacrifices in deciding whether to stay or return (Arthur and Flynn 2011). Therefore, many young graduates find themselves hesitating at the crossroads.

The role of gender has called for attention in international student mobility research for a long time. Extant literature has explored gender differences in the uneven flows of international students (Jöns 2011), motivations for overseas education (King and Sondhi 2016), lived experience and integration (Wang, Yu, and Wang 2011) and participation in employment (Shinozaki 2017). However, gendered experiences in the phase of post-study migration have thus been far less examined (King and Raghuram 2013). The existing though small body of work provides some valuable insights into the diverse and contextualized ways in which gender shapes graduates’ mobility aspirations and practices.

Differences in gender ideologies and gendered social positioning in the places where transnationals are embedded have been found to be important in mobility decisions. A study on graduates of Norwegian universities found that staying after graduation was seen by many individuals as an opportunity to avoid struggles with gendered social ideologies in their home country (Basford and van Riemsdijk 2017). The influences of gender selves are more highlighted when substantial dissimilarities of gender ideologies in the societies of home and education countries are perceived. A study on the career decisions of South Korean doctorates graduated from American universities found that staying abroad helps females unload perceived undesirable duties of being a woman in South Korea, such as the necessity of makeup (Yoon and Kim 2019). Sondhi and King (2017) found that female Indian returnees from the UK felt circumscribed due to a lack of freedom to walk unchaperoned and to drink alcohol in India, and thus searched for chances to migrate again. Perceived gendered roles in the household shape the career and mobility decisions of graduates. A case study on Chinese graduates in the UK, for instance, reports that males attach higher importance to the salary level as they are expected to earn a high income to fulfil the male responsibilities in Chinese society, such as being financially independent and affording a house. By contrast, women plan their mobility pathways more with an aim to promote their social and marital status (Moskal 2020).

Another line of research brings forth gender imbalances when couples imagine and negotiate mobility aspirations at a household level. These studies explore the role of gender relations in deciding who the primary migrant and the tied mover are in “linked lives”. Lee and Kim (2010) conclude that among South Korean doctoral candidates in the USA, women always follow their male partners’ post-study decisions, with rare exceptions. Geddie’s (2013) research on international science and engineering graduates in Toronto and London produced similar findings. She shows that women opt to compromise to suit their partner’s career development and sacrifice their own career prospects in the study-to-work status transition. Though rare and highly dependent on specific contexts, some studies have also shown that women are not always trailing spouses. Schaer and colleagues (2017) explore the life stories of three couples raised in Western societies and studied in the USA, the UK and Switzerland. They classify three types of gendered management of couples’ mobility post-graduation: dual-career mobility, male-primary mobility and female-primary mobility. Underpinning the three modes is the pattern that the one with a less promising plan conforms to his/her partner’s career-driven mobility pathways regardless of gender.

Building on this emergent scholarship, this paper takes a systematic look at gender at multiple levels. To do so, we draw on the gender structure theory proposed by Barbara Risman (2004), who advocates a three-level analytical framework that conceptualizes gender as a social structure, comprising three distinct but intersecting dimensions – namely individual, interactional and institutional:

• The individual level concerns the construction and socialization of gendered selves.

• Gender at the interactional level refers to daily exchanges with and expectations of other individuals. Gender identities are constructed through interpersonal relations, leading to gender-specific responsibilities, practices and interactions (Risman and Davis 2013). At the same time, one formulates gendered expectations about others’ performance in a social relationship.

• At the institutional level, gender is embedded in organizational and legal schemes, regulating gender ideologies and performances in society, economy and other systems beyond individual and inter-relational domains. Institutions are argued to set up gendered regulations concerning participation, rights and duties (Risman and Davis 2013). Even when official discourses, rules and regulations of organizations, institutions, and society start to turn increasingly gender-neutral, gendered logic and produce gendered meanings are not immediately erased (Williams 2001).

In this framework, gender at the three levels is equally important and works interactively to produce and shape everyday gender identities, (in)equality and practices (Risman 2004). While putting gender at the centre, we operate with an intersectional perspective and pay attention to how it operates with other axes of differences, such as race, sexuality, age and class (Risman 2004; Mohanty 2003).

In addition to our attention to spatialities (scales), we also emphasize the importance of temporalities in mapping out and understanding young migrants’ experiences and decisions in the study-to-work transition. Specifically, we draw on life-course perspectives that have contributed to debates around a wide variety of sociological topics. In student migration research, Findlay and colleagues (2012) argue that students’ mobility trajectories should not be disconnected from their overall life courses and subsequent mobility aspirations. In their study about international graduates in Denmark, Mosneaga and Winther (2013) observe multiple domains enmeshed in the young migrants’ study-to-work transition: starting their career; shouldering new responsibilities towards their family and romantic relationships; adjusting to the new (transitional) institutional settings regarding labour markets and residence stability. Post-graduation mobility, therefore, is best studied with a life-course perspective. Isolating it as a once-and-for-all act would risk losing sight of the impact it has on one’s longer and broader life trajectory.

This “stretch beyond” approach also helps substantiate our understanding of integration processes among migrants. As individuals who are embedded in changing (transnational) contexts transit from one life phase to another, the purposes, forms and duration of their perceptions and practices of (not) integrating change continuously. These dynamic and relational constellations give rise to multiple and shifting integration scenarios. While making work, life and mobility decisions at different crossroads on their life paths, young migrants are expected and opt to integrate (anew) into their new “home”, whether it is the place of study, place of origin and/or somewhere else. Depending on their (next) life plan, their need and wish to integrate, as in finding and also making a place in their “home”, vary. As for other migrants, for these young graduates, integration – with the questions where to, what for, how and for how long? – is neither predetermined nor unquestioned. In her ethnographic research with female Chinese students in Australia, Martin (2018) proposes the concept of “zone of suspension” to explain the decisions made by her research participants to stay in Australia. By integrating into the Australian labour market, these young Chinese women delayed or removed perceived burdens, such as wifely duties and motherhood, which are assigned to the transition to post-study adulthood in traditional gender ideologies in China. Her study stretches the concept of integration in spatial and temporal dimensions. By integrating into Australian society, at least economically, the Chinese women in her study gained time and opportunities to adjust their pace of transition to adulthood, and hence avoid or postpone their integration (back) into the gender ideologies at “home”.

Context: Chinese student mobility to The Netherlands

China is the largest country of origin in the global flow of international students. The number of outbound Chinese students exceeded 560,000 in 2010 (Börjesson 2017). As reported by the Chinese Ministry of Education (2018), most outbound students favour to pursue advanced education in the “developed West”, including the USA and Western Europe. The Netherlands is experiencing a growing inflow of international students from China. In 2020, the number of Chinese students starting their study in the Netherlands reached 4,940, ranking third after Germany (24,569) and Italy (6,189) (Nuffic 2021). Chinese students are attracted to the quality and low tuition fees of Dutch universities (as compared to other English-speaking destinations such as the USA and the UK) and the perceived egalitarian social atmosphere (Hong et al. 2017). Of the new incoming students from China in 2020, 2,067 (41.2%) enrolled in Bachelor’s programmes and 2,873 (58.2%) in Master’s programmes (Nuffic 2021). Economics and business (33%) and engineering (24.6%) are the most popular fields of study (Nuffic 2021).

Possible work opportunities in the Netherlands are also attractive to Chinese students. In the Netherlands, an “orientation year residence permit” (verblijfsvergunning zoekjaar hoogopgeleiden) is offered to non-EEA young graduates from Dutch higher education institutions and foreign top-ranked universities, allowing them to seek a job in high-skilled sectors in the Netherlands for one year after they complete their studies (Hong et al. 2017). This scheme also lowers the minimum salary requirements for graduates younger than 30 years, thus making migration more possible (Wiesbrock and Hercog 2012). Furthermore, it formulates less restrictive civic integration requirements, such as learning Dutch and acquiring knowledge about Dutch society and the Dutch labour market, than those applied to other types of migrants in “low-skilled” sectors (Aksakal and Reslow 2019). According to a survey in 2016, at least 30 per cent of Chinese graduates applied for such a residence permit (Hong et al. 2017), allowing them a certain amount of freedom to make post-study career, mobility and integration decisions.

Methodologies

Our empirical data were gathered with mixed methods comprising an online survey (n = 96), semi-structured interviews and the “story completion” method during the period March 2018–January 2019. In this paper, we draw on our qualitative data. They offer in-depth insights into how gender at the three levels performs, interacts with each other, and intersects with other differences in the debates and negotiations of mobility plans post-graduation. Through the survey, snowballing and the first author’s social network, we recruited 25 graduates and students who were about to graduate and were looking for a job or already had one to probe their lived entanglement of gender with mobility aspirations. Table 1 shows the socio-demographic characteristics of our research participants. To enrich the understanding of the embeddedness of gender in various mobility plans, efforts were made to recruit students who were in or aspired to stay in or return to different countries. Interviewees were asked to share their experiences of mobility and integration, the realization of their mobility plans, the impact of gender in mobility plans, and interplays of the gendered plans with the individual, the family, the labour market and other social domains. The first author also interviewed three parents of student interviewees to complement insights into their impacts on children’s mobility aspirations.

Table 1. Socio-demographics of Interview Participants.

Graduates	Gender	Male	10	40%
n=25		Female	15	60%
	Age	18–25	10	40%
		26–32	14	56%
		33–40	1	4%
	Education Level	PhD	3	12%
		Master	13	52%
		Bachelar	9	36%
	(Planned) Destination after status transition	The Netherlands	14	56%
		China	7	28%
		Germany	1	4%
		Norway	1	4%
		USA	1	4%
		Japan	1	4%
Parents	Gender	Male	1	33%
n=3		Female	2	67%
	Age	48–55	2	67%
		56–63	1	33%
	Children's current country of residence	The Netherlands	2	67%
		China	1	33%

“Story completion” was conducted along with the interviews, asking participants to make a return-or-stay decision for the characters in three hypothetical scenarios. These scenarios were concocted based on real stories from first-round interviews in March 2018 and our observation as migrants with a Chinese background ourselves, foregrounding gendered considerations intertwined with other personal and contextual factors and contradictions in the decision-making process. This method is commonly practiced among psychology researchers to approach the unconscious or hidden feelings among interviewees (Braun, Clarke, and Gray 2017). This method added depth to our conversations. Most informants were more comfortable and talkative when commenting on other people’s stories. Besides, they analysed the scenarios in more dimensions than they did with their personal experience. When we jumped back to questions about their personal experience after the story completion, they were more willing to share how they themselves were influenced by these contextual aspects. Although the quotations used in this paper rarely concern the hypothetical stories per se, some were inspired by this method. Being a Chinese graduate of a Dutch university who is also in such a transition stage, the first author, who conducted the interviews, found it easy to relate to the participants’ stories and deepen the conversations about the challenges and opportunities. We fully audio recorded, transcribed and translated the interviews into English, while retaining some colloquial Chinese words and sayings. All interviewees are given a pseudonym for anonymity.

Gendered study-to-work transitions: three vignettes

In this section, three vignettes will be presented to reveal how gender, operating at multiple levels, shapes young graduates’ mobility paths in interactional and intersectional ways through daily practices and negotiations. These three chosen vignettes are lived stories that demonstrate many circumstances, concerns, debates and strategies frequently mentioned in the interviews. They vividly depict how gendered mechanisms that involve personal identities, family relationships, labour markets and sociocultural contexts define young graduates’ mobility over time in a transnational context. Each vignette uncovers the role of gender in initiating and facilitating the debates on mobility and integration aspirations and arrangements.

Vignette one: rethinking the initial dream as a feminist – Ming

Ming was a 30-year-old female scholar who, at the time of the interview, was about to obtain her PhD in a social science discipline. She grew up in a small village in China where, she said, gender norms are “relatively conventional”. After attaining her Master’s degree at a renowned university in southern China, she moved to the Netherlands on a Chinese government scholarship, to pursue a PhD at the age of 26. She believed the excellent academic quality and global recognition of Dutch doctoral degrees would move her towards her career goal of becoming an academic in China, a goal that was set prior to her moving to the Netherlands. Nevertheless, she became less and less certain about this initial plan as she learned about and pondered her gendered identity and position.

Ming acknowledged in our interview that “feminist awakening” was one of her biggest gains from the years of studying abroad. When she started living in the Netherlands, she was first shocked by the “diverse hairstyles and colours on the streets and the campus”. Not long after, however, she started to admire these females who were confident to express who they were. As time progressed, she began to appreciate gender cultures in “Western society” for being less judgemental. In addition to physical appearances, “frequent feminist demonstrations”, which she had not experienced in China, sparked her awareness of women’s emancipation. She realized that there could be much more personal values that a woman could produce than “her relatively patriarchal hometown” would allow. This led to an individual-level transformation of her gender self and practices:

I used to like wearing skirts (in my hometown), but now I hate wearing them. This is a simple example. I am more myself here. I do not have to do anything just because other people like me doing it.

The perceived freer gender culture in the Dutch social environment and events empowered her to break free from what was expected of her “at home” such as wearing skirts to perform more freely her gender identity. The daily internalization of feminism, as she defined it, made “gender” an important criterion when she looked for a job. During a return visit to China, Ming had some job interviews for lecturer positions at several universities to pave the way to accessing the Chinese academic job market post-graduation. She recalled:

I checked how many female interviewers there are because it implies women’s promotion opportunities in this university. There were some interviews in which questions about my marriage and childbirth plans were asked. I felt a little offended. I will not choose such a university either. This is supposed to be a two-way choice.

Her narrative reveals how gender inequality can be observed in Chinese labour markets and family duties. Although highly-educated women in China attach growing value to career success, they commonly accept sacrifices for their husbands and families (Ji 2015; Leung 2014). As such, employers consider women less devoted to work, with the burdens of marriage and children, thereby undervaluing women’s potential at work. Employers often ask young female candidates about their childbirth plans to avoid having to pay for maternity leave ahead of reaping benefits from the new hires. Some candidates are even reportedly forced to take a pregnancy test and put in writing that they will not get married and have children within a certain number of years (Liu and Peng 2017). These discriminative practices in the labour markets illustrate how reintegration for Chinese graduates back home is a highly gendered process. While it is often taken for granted that overseas academic degrees will lead to better career prospects for young graduates, the benefits of student mobility are unevenly distributed across the gender divide.

It needs to be pointed out that such gender prejudices are deep-seated and were known to Ming before she moved to the Netherlands. However, they had only become problematic after she had unlearned, in a way, the deep and blatant inequalities in gender positions. Reaching the end of her PhD journey, she found herself wandering at the crossroads and debating where to go and what to do next. Even a return was originally considered:

It began to feel very hard to say goodbye to the Netherlands. Maybe I will reconsider my choice or come back later because “female PhD” [女博士] is used as a discriminatory word [in China] referring to a third kind of person, other than man or woman. Even if this [discriminatory] discourse is moving in a more positive direction [in broader society], most people still regard my marriage and motherhood as problems, since a “normal” Chinese woman should have done these at my age. I feel so confined. But in this [Dutch] society, age is not problematic at all, and I can do whatever I want without caring about anybody else. So, I’m confused now.

As Ming pointed out, “female PhDs” are commonly mocked as a sexless “third gender” (Xu 2021) in the public discourse. The term, with negative connotations, has circulated in social media and become popular, reinforcing prejudice against highly-educated women and the late marriage that is common among them (Gaetano 2014). These highly-educated women are considered undesirable in the “marriage market” because they have passed the socially perceived prime marriage age, during which they work on their degrees and become less attractive to men. Their delayed marriage is also seen as a cause of lower fertility and greater risk of miscarriage, which are perceived as obstacles to an important duty of Chinese women, namely childbearing. In addition to their age, their high skill and knowledge levels are often considered a challenge to men’s superior status in traditional families and society. While being an independent person and ready to fight, Ming is aware that her return with high skills will not bring her independence and social respect once and for all. Instead, her return would mean setting out on a reintegration journey, on which she would be labelled and challenged with unwanted stereotypes.

Difficulties encountered by graduates wanting to reintegrate back home are also found at other levels. As Ming advanced her academic career overseas, she found herself being delinked from the life phase trajectories of her old friends in China:

Many of my old classmates and friends in China are already married and mothers. When I hang out with them, the conversations are quite often around the relationship with their husband, in-laws and childbearing. I really have nothing to say. I sense a huge distance between us.

Prejudices and exclusion back home at multiple levels intersect to make Ming doubt her initial plan to return. Yet, staying in the Netherlands would come with other integration challenges. Even though Ming highly appreciates the level of emancipation and gender equality in the Netherlands, or even romanticizes about it a bit, she is also aware that the Dutch labour market is gendered and racialised, recognized by many of our informants who had already worked in the Netherlands. Evolving also from the traditional gender division of labour, the Dutch labour market is also marked by gender gaps in occupational status and earnings. In the Netherlands, like in most societies globally, household and childrearing duties are more likely to be shouldered by women, which reduces their capability and motivation to get a paid job (Holland Alumni Network n.d.). There is also a glass ceiling, with less than 30% of senior positions held by women. Migrants from a Chinese ethnic background are disadvantaged in the labour market. In Altintas and colleagues’ (2009) experiment to test discrimination against ethnic minorities in high-skilled jobs, candidates with a Chinese-sounding name were less likely to be invited to a job interview compared with those with Dutch or Moroccan-sounding names. Therefore, a migrant Chinese woman, like Ming, is likely to face double difficulties in the labour market. At the juncture of study-to-work transition, international graduates chart their mobility trajectory based on limited knowledge and experiences, which shape their imagination about possible futures that are linked to possible destinations. The way gender is played out in these different societies is important for this decision-making process.

Vignette two: sketching mobility in linked lives – Ma and Lin

Ma, a 24-year-old man, had just obtained a Master’s engineering degree in the Netherlands. He got a one-year employment contract with a Dutch company. His girlfriend, Lin, was also 24. She was a fresh Master’s graduate in another engineering programme from the same Dutch university. She had a hard time finding a job in the Netherlands. At the time of the interview, she aspired to pursue a PhD but had not found any suitable vacancy. She intended to return to China soon and look for a job. In the meantime, she would be preparing an application for a Chinese government scholarship. If successful, this would fund her PhD project and bring her back to the Netherlands.

In their separate interviews, neither expressed interest in long-term migration. Having this “final” destination set, they jointly made plans for their medium-term mobility trajectories. Unlike the usually discussed tied-moving couples who move together, their case presents more flexible linked mobility. Looking into the future, they were ready to be temporarily apart while pursuing divergent career and mobility plans, but still tied to an overall linked life plan, taking marriage, settlement, career and family formation into consideration. Ma explained their jointly decided migration plan, dotted with career options on their life paths until they get married:

In our traditional Chinese view, parents believe that women are supposed to get married around 27 years old. Maybe 26, 28.

(…  …)

I do not plan to get Dutch citizenship, so my plan is to return home after a maximum of two or three years, mainly depending on whether I like my job here. My girlfriend and I are both 24 years old and will become 27 or 28 in three or four years’ time. If I like this job, they [his family and girlfriend] should be supportive for me to stay here for these years. If she can successfully get a PhD in the Netherlands in these two years, we will just return home together at the age of 27 or 28. If she stays in China these years, I will find my job in China near her after the return. And then our life should be stable, and we should consider the next stage of life.

This mobility “master plan” reflects how gender, age and employability intersect to shape these young people’s vision of the linked future. Their plan was heavily underpinned by the perceived optimal marriage age in conservative Chinese perspectives. In Chinese public ideology, the late twenties are considered turning points, especially for females, to undertake crucial life events, namely marriage and childbearing (Martin 2018). And for many, being married also means ending a mobile life and settling down. Mobility options can be tested until an individual reaches their “best marriage age”, which is a kind of deadline. Opposite to the way stay-or-return decisions are described as a one-off movement, this couple perceives it as an in-between life phase. In this extended transition period, a temporary and fluid scheme for multi-local or transnational integration is envisaged. Their mobility plan displayed a clear gendered order: male as primary and female as secondary or a tied mover. When we posed a hypothetical scenario that prioritizes Lin’s career, Ma saw no space for that:

Hao: Is it feasible that your girlfriend finds a PhD elsewhere, like in the US?

Ma: No. She has to be in the Netherlands.

Hao: What if you feel frustrated with the work here?

Ma: Then I would return and then we just can stay together in China.

Commenting on the same scenario during a separate interview, Lin said, “I never thought about PhDs outside of the Netherlands”. Committed to their relationship, Lin’s options of location for her PhD were restricted by Ma’s workplace. It was also assumed that she would switch and terminate her PhD research to fit Ma’s work situation. The gender bias towards Ma in their relationship reflects the structural gendered inequalities not only in Chinese society and culture, but also in the global labour market. Research in the Netherlands (Hartog and Salverda 2018) and in China (Liu and Peng 2017) has found that (migrant) women are usually disadvantaged in employment and career development. Our interviewees were also aware of the bigger challenge Lin would face finding opportunities in the Netherlands. In our interview, Ma made the explicit statement about this inequality, to which Lin also agreed, “it is easier for men to get a job than for women”. This unrefuted assumption justifies in turn the “willingness” of women to play a supportive role in linked study-to-work decisions among couples.

Lin: We discussed a lot for this plan. So that is not like I fully listened to him [Ma], but we both compromised a little bit for a better future for us. (…) We both want to be together, but it cannot happen in the current situation. The situation is that he has a job here and I do not see myself having too many opportunities in the Netherlands. I cannot force him to return with me. That would be too selfish.

Hao: What is his sacrifice then?

Lin: He also needs to return next year. And if I have a job in China by then, he should find a job in the same city.

In this conversation, we noticed that Lin, while being open about her readiness to accommodate Ma’s career plan, asserts that she might also be leading their mobility plan one day. As (Schaer, Dahinden, and Toader 2017) conclude in their study on young academics in Switzerland, the USA and the UK, gender relations are dynamic, being “done” and “undone” between couples. The capacity of transnational young couples to arrange, negotiate and rearrange their linked lives are enabled and constrained by the transnational structural contexts and gendered societal expectations. The power relationship between couples is dependent also on the unevenly gendered, intersecting and multi-scalar social fields in which they are embedded, ranging from the interpersonal in the domestic sphere to broader cultural traditions and the labour market. The future of this young couple remains open. Yet, the next turning point of their life phase – parenthood – is likely to introduce deeply gendered dynamics.

Vignette three: staying for LGBT inclusiveness – Li

Li was 27 years old and a lesbian. She came to the Netherlands when she was 24 to do a Master’s in a business discipline. She firmly determined to stay in the Netherlands after studying because of the “more open and inclusive social environment” she experienced towards her lesbian identity. She had started her job search before she graduated and finally secured a position as a sales representative in the Netherlands using the “search year” visa. She admitted her current job lacked “an excellent career prospect”, but she needed to sacrifice that for now to secure a place in the Dutch labour market. She detailed her reason for staying:

The most important factor for staying in the Netherlands is that I am a sexual minority, which accounts for 60–70 per cent of why I am still here. After returning to China, I would not dare to hold hands [with my partner] in the street. My friends also advised me not to go back. Society and the workplace environment still regard me as a “strange” person. I feel that China’s social environment is very intolerant. I do not know when the policy targeting me will come out and when the knife will cut my head.

Li expressed a sense of emotional insecurity of being a homosexual in Chinese society. She had hidden her sexual orientation in China, also from her parents. The (potential) threat in public spaces and workplaces makes a return unattractive. Although LGBT movements have gained awareness in recent years, overall political discourse, the practice of social intolerance and censorship restrain the movements (Shaw and Zhang 2018). While homosexuality is not actively persecuted in China, it is considered a deviation from the norm and is not supported in sociocultural and political spheres, maintaining a high level of exclusion in conjugal and familial contexts (Hildebrandt 2011). Same-sex marriage is not allowed. Hence, marriage, family and childbirth remain exclusively heterosexual notions (Hu and Li 2019). As Li approached the life phase when marriage and childbirth were expected to happen, staying in the Netherlands saved her from these troubles. Being at a distance, she could avoid confrontations regarding her sexual orientation. She wanted to stay away from likely speculations by her family, relatives and colleagues concerning her sexuality and being the centre of gossip in the family and at work. If she were to return, the highly gendered and discriminative society would, in her imagination, push her to conceal her sexuality, marry a man, disguise herself as a “graceful wife” and fulfil her childbirth duty. By contrast, she felt that “gender and sexuality prejudices are at least not that obvious” in her daily work life in the Netherlands, which became her main motivation to stay.

However, not returning could not help her escape gendered expectations in Chinese society and among her family. As Li’s parents did not know about her sexual orientation, they became worried and urged her to put more effort into finding a partner. While being away obviated proactive tactics commonly practised by Chinese parents, such as arranging blind dates, her parents persisted in pressuring her over the phone and trying to convince her to return. To reduce the tensions and convince her parents, Li organized a trip for her parents to visit her in Europe.

My parents and I frequently argue about the question of stay or return. Last week, my parents came to visit. And I initiated the visit. I wanted to show them where I live, where I work and introduce them to more of the merits of Europe. I hoped they could see I’m happy here and reduce the worries about me being alone in a foreign country. When my mother left, I noticed she had changed. My father was still stubborn. But there has been progress.

Even though Li had the attitude of “just not listen” when her parents expressed views opposite to hers, she struggled to uphold the filial piety that is highly valued in Chinese culture. Rather than coming out to her parents, which she expected would be difficult for them, she decided to create a “zone of suspension” (Martin 2018), as we presented earlier. This would open space for her to delay or remove certain gendered expectations and duties. During the precious parent–child time during her parents’ visit, Li did her best to present herself as an independent woman in a desirable living environment to convince them that staying in the Netherlands would benefit her career and overall life in the long run. In this way, she leveraged the extra time to transform current pressure into potential support. She shared her longer-term migration plan:

I want to stay in the Netherlands as long as possible. I am now accumulating work experience here. Maybe in three or five years, I will have a good career and salary. And I will pass the Dutch language test and be capable of getting a permanent residence permit. Then in some ways, I can move my parents here and permanently stay here.

Li’s plan shows it is not her intention to live her life as a lesbian away from home and reject her role as a daughter and, in her case, a single child. Rather than choosing between this and that at a particular moment, the process of her decision making is long and evolves as her parents age. In order to have the option of being able to take care of her parents when they get older, she planned to make integration efforts as required by the Dutch regulations. Being “Dutch” is, therefore, a way for Li to perform her filial duty as expected from a Chinese daughter and yet live in a sociocultural environment where she feels safe and free as a lesbian.

Revisiting the three vignettes through Risman’s lens

The three vignettes presented above show how gender, operating at and across individual, interactional and institutional levels, shapes international Chinese graduates’ mobility aspirations and practices. We would like to pinpoint some of the major observations we made in connection with Risman’s framework. Yet, it is important to underline how gender at the three levels intertwines and cannot be read in isolation.

At the individual level, the stories of Ming and Li illustrate particularly clearly how their gendered subjectivity affects their mobility plans. Both Ming (becoming more feminist) and Li (a lesbian), having had the chance to experience more freedom in performing their (new) gendered and sexual identities, recharted their original post-graduation career and mobility plans.

At the intersectional level, we detect the power of gender especially in the domain of marriage and parenthood, and how they influence the Chinese graduates’ experiences of their study-to-work transition. The three vignettes presented different types of social relationships in which gendered expectations are played out. Ma and Lin’s linked mobility planning is by no means even. Ma, being the future husband, is set to take the ultimate lead, with Lin adjusting her professional, and hence mobility aspiration, to follow. Their integration efforts made in the Netherlands and China are in turn being adjusted with this “final destination” set in their minds. Li’s case, on the other hand, shows the power of parent–child relationships in young graduates’ mobility plans. In order to gain support from her anxious parents for her stay in the Netherlands, she arranged a European trip for them to show the promise of life abroad and made plans to eventually bring them to the Netherlands in order to perform filial piety as expected from a Chinese child. Finally, Ming’s mobility is a cause and an effect of changes in her relationship with her peers. Due to her study abroad, she felt delinked from her friends who have “moved on” to being wives and mothers. This, in turn, deepened her doubt about returning.

Finally at the institutional level, we highlighted, through Ming and Lin, how gendered division labour at home and in the labour markets in China and the Netherlands affect the mobility aspirations and practices among young graduates. In the case of Lin, we also demonstrated the intersecting influence of gender and race in restricting employment chances for Chinese female graduates.

Our findings also illustrate how gender intersects with other social identities and positionalities, such as age, sexuality and race, in forming graduates’ mobility aspirations. As Chinese graduates move into the adulthood–work–reproduction phase, the pressure of starting a family follows and becomes increasingly pronounced over time. This deepens inequalities between men and women as family-related duties, burdens and social expectations are much more heavily placed on women’s shoulders. Parents’ and societal expectations and pressure intensify the conflicts between gender norms and non-heterosexual identities. As such, remaining abroad appears to be a desired pathway for non-heterosexuals (e.g. Li) and those who (want to) “delay” marriage (e.g. Ming). However, owing to the gendered and racialised nature of the Dutch labour market (Altintas, Maniram, and Veenman 2009) and the high requirements set for non-EU highly-skilled migration, securing a “decent” job remains an unrealistic goal of many Chinese graduates, especially women like Li.

The three lived stories also remind us that post-graduation mobility is not a one-time instant movement. For instance, Ma’s plan includes a short stay in the Netherlands before returning to China; Lin may come to the Netherlands again if she finds a PhD project; and Li has plans to one day bring her parents over to the Netherlands. The different long(er)-term mobility plans and purposes determine the graduates’ intention and practices of (re)integration. Although all of them needed to make efforts to integrate into Dutch society and the Dutch labour market post-graduation, Li will likely take further steps to integrate into Dutch society while Ma and Li will start preparing for integration into the Chinese labour market before moving back to China.

Conclusions

Our research examined the mobility decision-making process of a group of Chinese students undergoing the study-to-work transition in the Netherlands. Drawing on Barbara Risman’s gender structure theory, this paper illustrates how gender plays a role at three intersecting levels. As we have shown through the data of our qualitative research, the power of gender can be detected in individuals’ subjectivity, in interactional relationships with others, and at institutional or societal levels. Instead of discussing them separately, we offered three lived examples of graduates wandering at the crossroads upon completion of their international study. They highlight the complex ways in which gender works at the three intersecting scales and over time. Through these vignettes, we gain an understanding of how these young graduates, straddling two or more countries and sociocultural contexts, imagine their futures, which in turn pose particular (re)integration demands. These demands do not exist as a clear list to be checked off, once and for all, but change as these young people move across space and time. They are also adjusted as the relationship between these young transnationals and the people they are linked to change. Finally, the broader contexts in which these individuals are embedded also affect their (re)integration endeavours. Whether or not to integrate into a society is not a simple decision that reflects migrants’ mobility intention or loyalty. Rather, we have learned that some of these young graduates might make the effort to integrate to a certain degree into Dutch society and the Dutch labour market, with the ultimate goal – at some time in the future – of returning to China as a successful son or husband, or in another case being able to be a filial Chinese daughter. Hence, people can (re)integrate here and there, for certain periods of time and for reasons that are complex and changing, in a transnational lifeworld.

This research also provides clear evidence of how gender ideologies intersect with other axes of differences, such as age and sexuality. Gender and other axes of inequalities reinforce each other in forming inequalities in all important social domains such as family and workplaces. Moving from being a child to an adult, individuals in the study-to-work transition are expected to assume a new gendered role and bear new responsibilities as young adults who should get married and start a family. Especially for those who are perceived as deviating from the norm, it becomes more complex and difficult to coordinate these gender responsibilities and personal identities. Having left home and studied in another sociocultural context often leads to such “deviations” from the norm. The struggle to do justice to contradicting desires and demands creates extra burdens for young adults who have to fit in multiple contexts and make sacrifices. These negotiations and sacrifices tend to fall more heavily on those who are less privileged to start with, such as females (of a certain age) and non-heterosexuals (of a certain academic background). Yet, gender norms, expectations and privileges are not set in stone. During our research period, public policies favouring females’ employment were implemented in China and these might influence the mobility aspirations of soon-to-graduate students, and in turn change their need or desire to (re)integrate.

Our study also highlights the role of life course in attaching changing gender responsibilities to women and men over time. Gendered expectations, duties and rules vary and usually become heavier, less flexible and more complex as people mature. Being transnationals can make this transition more complex, as a choice of where to live and work is available. Being transnationals might provide a chance to fulfil, postpone or reconfigure the gendered duties that are usually expected at particular life course moments; it might also mean having to make sacrifices. The life stories of our participants remind us that study-to-work decisions are not made once and for all. Rather, these young adults often wander and take steps to reach their imagined future, often with other important people linked to their lives in a changing way as they move from one life phase to another.

Finally, our research also explored the benefit of innovative research methodologies. Gender, life course and mobility decision-making are all complex social processes that research participants often find hard to articulate. By integrating the “story completion” into our interviews, we guided our participants with imagined scenarios to recall, reflect and verbalize their own experiences of transforming gender roles, factors that affect their mobility decisions, as well as their motivations for and experiences of (re)integrating into different societies. By moving between the real and the imagined in our conversations, we sought to unravel the complex social mechanisms and structures that help us gain a better understanding of the hitherto less known study-to-work transition.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).