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After waves of women's liberation movements, the reform era has witnessed a puzzling stagnation, if not decline, in women's status in China. Among the existing literature on the changing public gender discourse in postsocialist China, few studies have substantially engaged with feminist critiques of the “separate spheres” as an analytical framework. In this study the authors performed content analyses on 202 articles drawn from 3 Chinese mainstream magazines between 1995 and 2012 to describe changes in media's framing of urban women's issues. Over time, topics on marriage and private relationships became increasingly predominant, while concerns over gender discrimination diminished in the mainstream media. The results provide evidence for a revitalization of traditional gender values attributing women to “private” spheres and reveal the media's repeated use of individualistic approaches to structural problems, suggesting an alliance between patriarchal and neoliberal ideologies in shaping public gender discourse while concealing structural inequalities in urban China.

BACKGROUND Although research on the consequences of economic recession has long linked unemployment with childbearing, it rarely distinguishes the effects of individuals' own unemployment and their surroundings' unemployment levels on their likelihood of having children. Even fewer studies compare how these effects vary for different groups of individuals. OBJECTIVE In this study we specifically ask whether fertility timings in the United States are more sensitive to the unemployment rates of individuals' immediate surroundings or to their own unemployment. Moreover, we investigate whether young adults with different educational levels and parental resources may adjust their childbearing timing differently in response to their own employment status and local unemployment rates. METHODS Using 17 rounds of data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, we fit discrete-time event history models predicting men's and women's pace of childbearing. RESULTS The analysis indicates that relatively disadvantaged young adults, such as those with low education or parents with low education, tend to delay childbirth in response to high local unemployment rates but are less likely than the more advantaged to defer childbearing when facing their own unemployment. CONCLUSIONS We argue that the disadvantaged are relatively sensitive to the local unemployment rate but relatively insensitive to their own unemployment compared to those with fewer disadvantages, because the former suffer more from unemployment in times of

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