Labor market segmentation and the gender wage gap: Evidence from China

Although the Chinese government has implemented a variety of measures, the gender wage gap in 21st century China has not decreased. A significant body of literature has studied this phenomenon using sector segmentation theory, but these studies have overlooked the importance of the collective economy beyond the public and private sectors. Moreover, they have lacked assessment of the gender wage gap across different wage groups, hindering an accurate estimation of the gender wage gap in China, and the formulation of appropriate recommendations. Utilizing micro-level data from 2004, 2008, and 2013, this paper examines trends in the gender wage gap within the public sector, private sector, and collective economy. Employing a selection bias correction based on the multinomial logit model, this study finds that the gender wage gap is smallest and most stable within the public sector. Furthermore, the private sector surpasses the collective economy in this period, becoming the sector with the largest gender wage gap. Meanwhile, a recentered influence function regression reveals a substantial gender wage gap among the low-wage population in all three sectors, as well as among the high-wage population in the private sector. Additionally, employing Brown wage decomposition, this study concludes that inter-sector, rather than intra-sector, differences account for the largest share of the gender wage gap, with gender discrimination in certain sectors identified as the primary cause. Finally, this paper provides policy recommendations aimed at addressing the gender wage gap among low-wage groups and within the private sector.

The Positive Effect of Women's Education on Fertility in Low-Fertility China

Despite pervasive evidence of more educated women having lower fertility, it remains unclear whether education reduces women's fertility. This study presents new evidence of the causal effect of women's education on fertility from China, where fertility has remained below the replacement level since the early 1990s. To account for endogeneity, the study exploits the timing and varying intensity of China's higher education expansion as exogenous sources of increase in women's education. Using data from China General Social Survey (2010-2012), findings show that each year of women's education induced by the higher education expansion increases the number of children ever born by 10%. According to the average marginal effects, each additional year of women's education increases the number of children ever born by 0.14, decreases the probability of having no children by 3 percentage points, and increases the probability of having two or more children by 4 percentage points. Two mechanisms drive the positive effect of education: first, education does not cause an increase in the mean age at first marriage; second, among ever-married women, education increases their demand for children. Findings from this study have important implications for China and other low-fertility developing countries.

Family status and women's career mobility during urban China's economic transition

BACKGROUND

In contrast to the historical experience of Western welfare states, where social and family policies help create more integrated public-private spheres, marketization in China has presented a case of sphere separation. This phenomenon has important implications for the dynamics of gender inequality in economic transition.

OBJECTIVE

This article examines how family status is associated with women's career mobility in reform-era urban China and the impact of family on women's career choices across different reform stages.

METHOD

Based on retrospective data from the Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS) in 2008, we adopt discrete-time logit models to examine the effects of marriage and childbearing on women's upward mobility, the risk of labor market exit, and how the effects vary over time.

RESULTS

Chinese women in the workforce are adversely affected by marriage and having dependent children. They are more likely than men to experience (involuntary, in particular) job exit to fulfill their roles as wives and mothers and less likely to move up in the career ladder. This pattern is more prominent as the economic reform proceeds.

CONCLUSION

Marketization has adversely affected Chinese women's career outcomes by increasing work-family tension after the work unit (danwei) system and socialist programs that supported working women were scrapped.

CONTRIBUTION

This study is one of the few empirical studies to attempt to explain the widening gender gap in China's job market from the perspective of family using the two-sphere separation framework. The framework originated in Western family studies but has been adapted to suit the context of urban China.

Visible and invisible hands intertwined: State-market symbiotic interactions and changing income inequality in urban China

Analyzing the restructured political economy in 21st-century urban China, this project develops a "symbiotic interaction" model and reconceptualizes the state-market relationship to appreciate the changing inequality patterns. As the state and market have formed a long-term, intimate relationship, dynamic state policies interact with the fragmented labor market to redefine a set of socioeconomic capitals and statuses in affecting income inequality. Drawing empirical evidence from the Chinese General Social Survey 2003 and 2013 data, this paper employs linear and unconditional quantile regressions to compare income disparity patterns along both temporal and socio-spatial dimensions. The findings show that multiple key factors, including human capital (e.g., college education), political capital (e.g., party membership), occupational status (e.g., self-employment), and organizational type (e.g., state-owned enterprise), have all changed their economic returns over time and also played different roles for various earning groups. These findings suggest that we should conduct substantive institutional analyses of the evolving state-market relationship and their interplay to achieve a deeper understanding of the reshuffled stratification order in contemporary China. The proposed analytical framework also has broad implications in the research of other transitional economies.

Stark Choices: Work-family Trade-offs among Migrant Women and Men in Urban China

China's so-called "floating population" of rural-urban labor migrants includes rising numbers of couples and families migrating together. Labor market outcomes may differ for migrant men and women, in part due to family obligations, but few recent studies have investigated this possibility. This paper focuses on the relationship of labor outcomes with family obligations among migrant men and women and considers whether this relationship differs among those with higher and lower earnings potential. We perform nested logit models of employment status and OLS regression analyses of income, using a nationally-representative survey collected in 2013. For migrant women, childcare responsibilities are negatively associated with employment and income. In contrast, for migrant men, being co-resident with children has no bearing on probability of being employed full-time and is sometimes positively associated with income. Further, the "motherhood penalty" in income is most pronounced among migrant women with the least education. Results illustrate the embeddedness of individual migration decisions and outcomes within families. Findings also highlight a stark choice facing many migrant women: between earning for their children and living with them.

Motherhood Penalties and Living Arrangements in China

Past research on the "motherhood wage penalty" has all been based on data from nuclear families, leaving open the possibility that the motherhood wage penalty may be lower or even absent in multi-generational families. In this paper, the wage gap between mothers and non-mothers is examined in both nuclear and multi-generational families in the context of contemporary China, which has a long tradition of patriarchal families. Using 1993-2006 China Health and Nutrition Survey data, the magnitude and variation of motherhood penalty is explored with fixed effects models among 1,058 women. It is found that each additional child lowers hourly wages by about 12 percent. In addition, the results show that the motherhood penalty is largest for women living with husband's parents, smaller for women not living with parents, and nil for women living with their own parents.

Women's employment trajectories during early adulthood in urban China: A cohort comparison

This study uses retrospective work history data from CGSS 2008 and employs group-based trajectory analysis to model the diverse employment trajectories of cohorts of urban Chinese women (born in the 1940s-1970s) during young adulthood (age 20-35). We identify ideal-types of urban women's employment trajectories and explore traits associated with each group type. In particular, we examine whether and how the timing of marriage and fertility as well as socioeconomic background help to distinguish patterns of women's labor force attachment in young adulthood. We also examine how these patterns change across cohorts given China's rapid social transformations in the past few decades. We find that delaying family formation is generally associated with more consistent work attachment, but this relationship is also largely associated with one's socioeconomic background. Our results reveal significant cohort variations in the shape of women's employment trajectories and we discuss how institutional and cultural contexts of different historical periods could have shaped family formation and employment processes differently. Our findings highlight the heterogeneity of urban women's work and family formation patterns in the context of rising gender inequalities and rapid socioeconomic transformation over time.

Patterns of Inequalities in Public Transfers by Gender in China

This paper empirically examines gender inequality in benefiting from public education, health care and pension transfers over the lifecycle in China. Based on data from the 2010 wave of China Family Panel Studies and government statistics, we apply the internationally comparable method of National Transfer Account to conduct analyses. The results show that, although public health care and pension transfers are remarkably biased against women at old ages, public education transfers are essentially gender-neutral even at the tertiary education level. Gender inequality among older cohorts is largely a legacy of past occupational and earning privileges for males, and the fragmented design of health insurance and pension programs. With growing female advantage in education and a gradual unification of social security system, the gender gap in public transfers in China is expected to narrow in the coming years.