Family Background, Gender and Educational Attainment in Urban China

Abstract

Substantial gender imbalances in Chinese higher education and in the urban occupational structure are widely recognized.1 Women comprise only about one–third of students in colleges and universities, and they tend to be concentrated in particular types of institutions, such as teacher training colleges, and departments such as humanities, while men predominate in the scientific and engineering fields that have served as the primary avenues for upward occupational and political mobility. In the urban workforce, men are overrepresented in state–run factories and in positions of authority and expertise generally, while women are overrepresented in the collective sector, medium and light industry, and in the lower clerical and service sectors. These circumstances are the result of pervasive societal sorting processes which begin much earlier in life than sitting for the college entrance exams or entering the labour force, and which channel girls and boys towards different if partially overlapping futures. The research we report here on the determinants of educational attainment at the senior high school level helps to shed light on processes of gender differentiation and stratification in urban China.

Women in China's Long Twentieth Century

“…Girls with aspirations for higher education face gender-specific possibilities of becoming a less attractive marriage partner or failing to find a job, while boys expect to benefit more from additional academic achievement. Regardless of parental background, girls opt for keypoint academic programs (which receive the most resources and impose the highest entrance requirements) in far fewer numbers than boys, perpetuating a cycle in which more boys receive more education and enter technical and professional jobs at higher rates (Broaded and Liu 1996).…”

“…Jiang 2004). These trends have continued and by some accounts intensified during the reform period (Broaded and Liu 1996;Riley 1997). In times of economic retrenchment women were treated as a source of surplus labor rather than an integral component of socialist construction (Andors 1983;Bauer et al 1992).…”

“…Men and women maintained rough wage equity for the same kind of work, but a gendered division of labor tracked men into the higher-paying state sector and into more skilled, prestigious jobs across sectors (Davin 1976;Andors 1983;Bauer et al 1992; Y. Jiang 2004). These trends have continued and by some accounts intensified during the reform period (Broaded and Liu 1996;Riley 1997). In times of economic retrenchment women were treated as a source of surplus labor rather than an integral component of socialist construction (Andors 1983;Bauer et al 1992).…”

“…Girls with aspirations for higher education face gender-specific possibilities of becoming a less attractive marriage partner or failing to find a job, while boys expect to benefit more from additional academic achievement. Regardless of parental background, girls opt for keypoint academic programs (which receive the most resources and impose the highest entrance requirements) in far fewer numbers than boys, perpetuating a cycle in which more boys receive more education and enter technical and professional jobs at higher rates (Broaded and Liu 1996).This reflects broader national trends in which girls in 1982 were 43.7 percent of primary school students and 39.2 percent of high school students (Hooper 1984: 321). In the early 1990s women were 70 percent of all illiterates, about one-third of vocational and technical students, one-third of university undergraduates, and a quarter of graduate students (Croll 1995: 134-35).…”

The quantity-Quality trade-Off of children In a developing country: Identification using chinese twins

“…We are also among the fi rst to explicitly examine the tradeoff in the context of China. Most of the previous related studies explored the determinants of Chinese children's educational attainment and emphasized the rural-urban gap (Connelly and Zheng 2003;Hannum 1999;Knight andLi 1993, 1996), gender inequality (Broaded and Liu 1996;Hannum 2002Hannum , 2003Tsui and Rich 2002), or poverty and credit constraints (Brown and Park 2002). However, these studies either ignored the effect of family size or merely treated it as an exogenous control variable.…”