Income, work preferences and gender roles among parents of infants in Urban China: A mixed method study from Nanjing

China Quarterly

Volumn , Issue 204, 2010, Pages 939-959

  Won Kim, Sung ^b   Fong, Vanessa L ^a   Yoshikawa, Hirokazu ^b   Way, Niobe ^b   Chen, Xinyin ^b   Deng, Huihua ^b   Lu, Zuhong ^b  

^a HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

GENDER DISPARITY; GENDER ROLE; HOUSEHOLD INCOME; INCOME DISTRIBUTION; LOW INCOME POPULATION; QUALITATIVE ANALYSIS; URBAN SOCIETY; WAGE GAP; WOMENS STATUS; WORKING CONDITIONS;

CHINA; JIANGSU; NANJING [JIANGSU];

EID: 79957479334     PISSN: 03057410     EISSN: 14682648     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0305741010001037     Document Type: Article

References (101)

1. Amy Hanser, "The Chinese enterprising self: young, educated urbanites and the search for work", in Perry E. Link, Richard P. Madsen and Paul G. Pickowicz (eds.), Popular China: Unofficial Culture in a Globalizing Society (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), pp. 189-206.
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 Deborah S. Davis, "Self-employment in Shanghai: a research note", The China Quarterly, No. 157(1999), pp. 29-35.
3. See, for example, Siu C. Hau and Hang-yue Ngo, "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;
4. Laura James, "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.
5. See Yanjie Bian, "Chinese social stratification and social mobility", Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 28, No. 1(2002), pp. 91-116.
6. The state withdrew as the market became more influential in China with the economic reforms. In Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 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.
7. See Amy Hanser, Service Encounters: Class, Gender, and the Market for Social Distinction in Urban China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008);
8. Ann Anagnost, "The nationscape", in National Past-Times: Narrative, Representation, and Power in Modern China (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), pp. 161-75.
9. Deborah S. Davis and Julia S. Sensenbrenner, "Commercializing childhood: parental purchases for Shanghai's only child", in Deborah S. Davis (ed.), The Consumer Revolution in Urban China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000) 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.
10. Hanser, "The Chinese enterprising self; Lisa M. Hoffman, "Post-Mao professionalism: self-enterprise and patriotism", in Li Zhang and Aihwa Ong (eds.), Privatizing China: Socialism from Afar (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), pp. 168-81.
11. For instance, René V. Dawis and Lloyd H. Lofquist, A Psychological Theory of Work Adjustment: An Individual-Differences Model and its Applications (Minneapolis, MD: University of Minnesota Press, 1984)
12. and Donald E. Super, Manual, Work Values Inventory (Boston: Houghton-Miffin, 1970)
13. conceived of work values as needs whereas Robert Pryor, "In search of a concept: work values", Vocational Guidance Quarterly, Vol. 27, No. 3(1979), pp. 250-58, defined them as individual work aspect preferences regardless of what they think should be done.
14. Among many others, see Melvin L. Kohn, Class and Conformity: A Study in Values, with a Reassessment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977);
15. Adrie Kusserow, American Individualisms: Child Rearing and Social Class in Three Neighborhoods (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004);
16. Vanessa L. Fong, "Parent-child communication problems and the perceived inadequacies of Chinese only children", Ethos, Vol. 35, No. 1(2007), pp. 85-127.
17. Cultural models of gender were ambivalent because of the tension between the socialist state and capitalism. See Harriet Evans, "Past, perfect or imperfect: changing images of the Ideal Wife", in Susan Brownell and Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom (eds.), Chinese Femininities, Chinese Masculinities: A Reader (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), pp. 335-60;
18. Emily Honig and Gail Hershatter, Personal Voices: Chinese Women in the 1980's (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988);
19. Suzanne Gottschang, "The consuming mother: infant feeding and feminine body in China", in Nancy N. Chen (ed.), China Urban: Ethnographies of Contemporary Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), pp. 89-103. "Cultural models" are defined as meaning/belief systems of individuals, which grow from their experiences.
20. See Claudia Strauss and Naomi Quinn, A Cognitive Theory of Cultural Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997);
21. Roy G. D'Andrade and Claudia Strauss, Human Motives and Cultural Models (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
22. The glamorous "modern housewife", a capitalist re-creation of the traditional xianqi liangmu model, was promoted in the magazine market and public discourse. See Beverly Hooper, "'Flower vase and housewife': women and consumerism in post-Mao China", in Krishna Sen and Maila Stivens (eds.), Gender and Power in Affluent Asia (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 167-93.
23. Women models of success were depicted mainly as wives even if they were successful workplace achievers. See Harriet Evans, Women and Sexuality in China: Female Sexuality and Gender since 1949 (New York: Continuum, 1997), pp. 112-43.
24. Margery Wolf, Revolution Postponed: Women in Contemporary China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985), p. 74.
25. Julia Sensenbrenner, "Rust in the iron rice bowl", unpublished PhD dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, 1996.
26. Cecilia N. Milwertz, "The cultural assumption of virtuous wife and good mother", in Accepting Population Control: Urban Chinese Womenandthe One-Child Family Policy (Richmond: Curzon, 1997), pp. 150-82.
27. Cynthia D. Fisher and Xue Y. Yuan, "What motivates employees? A comparison of US and Chinese responses", International Journal of Human Resource Management, Vol. 9, No. 3(1998), pp. 516-28;
28. Hau and Ngo, "Gender differences in job attribute preferences", pp. 15-27.
29. 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.
30. Nan Lin, "Understanding the social inequality system and family and household dynamics in China", in Barbara Entwistle and Gail Henderson (eds.), Re-Drawing Boundaries: Work, Households, and Gender in China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), pp. 284-94.
31. 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
32. see Deborah Davis, "Job mobility in post-Mao cities: increases on the margins", The China Quarterly, No. 132(1992), pp. 1062-85;
33. Davis, "Self-employment in Shanghai";
34. Ching K. Lee, "From organized dependence to disorganized despotism: changing labour regimes in Chinese factories", The China Quarterly, No. 157(1999), pp. 44-71. (Pubitemid 29273661)
35. Martin K. Whyte, "Sexual inequality under socialism: the Chinese case in perspective", in James L. Watson (ed.), Class and Social Stratification (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 198-238.
36. 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.
37. 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 Jean C. Robinson, "Of women and washing machines: employment, housework, and the reproduction of motherhood in socialist China", The China Quarterly, No. 101(1985), pp. 32-57;
38. Lanyan Chen, Gender and Chinese Development: Towards an Equitable Society (London: Routledge, 2008);
39. Joanna Kerr, Julie Delahanty and Kate Humpage, Gender and Jobs in China's New Economy (Ottawa: North-South Institute, 1996);
40. Stanley Rosen, "Value change among post-Mao youth: the evidence from survey data", in Perry E. Link, Richard Madsen and Paul Pickowicz (eds.), Unofficial China: Popular Culture and Thought in the People's Republic (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1989), pp. 193-216.
41. Some formerly low-paying, female-dominated sectors of the economy became male-dominated once they became higher-paying. See Xiaoling Shu, Yifei Zhu and Zhanxin Zhang, "Global economy and gender inequalities: the case of the urban Chinese labor market", Social Science Quarterly, Vol. 88, No. 5(2007), pp. 1307-32;
42. Wang Zheng, "Gender, employment, and women's resistance", in Elizabeth J. Perry and Mark Selden (eds.), Chinese Society: Change, Conflict, and Resistance (London: Routledge, 2000);
43. Jackie West, Women of China: Economic and Social Transformation (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1999). 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."
44. Philip Cohen and Feng Wang, "Market and gender pay equity: have Chinese reforms narrowed the gap?" in Deborah Davis and Feng Wang (eds.), Creating Wealth and Poverty in Post-socialist China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), pp. 35-51.
45. Fisher and Yuan, "What motivates employees?";
46. Hau and Ngo, "Gender differences in job attribute preferences."
47. Phillip. J. Dewe, "Applying the concept of appraisal to work stressors: some exploratory analysis", Human Relations, Vol. 45, No. 2(1992), pp. 143-65.
48. Daniel C. Ganster and John Schaubroeck, "Work stress and employee health", Journal of Management, Vol. 17, No. 2(1991), pp. 235-71;
49. Robert A. Karasek, "Job demands, job decision latitude, and mental strain: implications for job redesign", Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 24, No. 2(1979), pp. 285-308.
50. Michael R. Frone, Marcia Russell and M. L. Cooper, "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.
51. Jaepil Choi, "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.
52. Jaepil Choi and Chao C. Chen, "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.
53. 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;
54. Evans, Women and Sexuality in China;
55. Elisabeth J. Croll, Changing Identities of Chinese Women: Rhetoric, Experience, and Self-Perception in 20th Century China (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1995).
56. Limin Bai, "Graduate unemployment: dilemmas and challenges in China's move to mass higher education", The China Quarterly, No. 185(2006), pp. 128-44.
57. Hanser, "The Chinese enterprising self."
58. 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.
59. Elizabeth Weldon and Wilfried Vanhonacker, "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.
60. Yang Cao and Victor G. Nee, "Comment: controversies and evidence in the market transition debate", American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 105, No. 4(2000), pp. 1175-89.
61. Deborah Carr, "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. 26-53 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).
62. 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.
63. James, "United by gender or divided by class?" pp. 394-412.
64. Julio Huato and Kathryn W. Zeno, "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. 261-75, also pointed to this gap in the literature.
65. See e.g. Entwistle and Henderson, Re-Drawing Boundaries;
66. Christina K. Gilmartin, Gail Hershatter, Lisa Rofel and Tyrene White, Engendering China: Women, Culture, and the State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994).
67. Zeng Yi, "Marriage patterns in contemporary China", in Peng and Guo, The Changing Population of China, p. 92.
68. Feng Wang, Boundaries and Categories: Rising Inequality in Post-Socialist Urban China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), p. 51.
69. 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.
70. China Statistical Yearbook, 2007.
71. Nanjing Municipal Data, 2006.
72. 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."
73. 49.3% girls and 50.7% boys.
74. 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.
75. 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.
76. 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 Tan Lin and Peng Xizhe, "China's female population", in Xizhe Peng and Zhigang Guo (eds.), The Changing Population of China (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 157.
77. This includes the bottom 14.2% of couples in our total sample.
78. 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.
79. "Opportunities for advancement and promotion" was positively correlated with the other three items at p <.01.
80. 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.
81. Family income was negatively correlated with wives' rating on benefits relating to child care (r = -.17, p <.01) and education (r = -.14, p <.01).
82. Family income was negatively correlated with security for husbands (r = -.13, p <.05).
83. 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.
84. 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.
85. See Wanxian Li, Xinmei Liu and Weiwu Wan, "Demographic effects of work values and their management implications", Journal of Business Ethics, Vol. 1, No. 4(2007), pp. 875-85 for further discussion on how age and education can affect job values in China.
86. 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).
87. Carr, "Two paths to self-employment?" pp. 26-53, also found this in an American sample.
88. Vanessa L. Fong, "China's one-child policy and the empowerment of urban daughters", American Anthropologist, Vol. 104, No. 4(2002), pp. 1098-1109.
89. This was echoed by low-income couples although this high-income couple was chosen as an example for being more articulate.
90. Ellen E. Pimentel, "Gender ideology, household behavior, and backlash in urban China", Journal of Family Issues, Vol. 27, No. 3(2006), pp. 341-65, 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. (Pubitemid 43706437)
91. 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."
92. 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.
93. 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 Richard Arum, "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.
94. Michelle J. Budig 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.
95. 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.
96. Entwistle and Henderson, Re-drawing Boundaries;
97. Anne Allison, Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).
98. Pun Ngai, Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).
99. See Lisa Rofel, Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China After Socialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 102. On issues concerning how maleness and manhood were conceived
100. 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;
101. Kam Louie, Theorising Chinese Masculinity: Society and Gender in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).