Women’s public role shrink in China as official rhetoric shift towards family, children: Study

The Chinese Communist Party has historically emphasized the importance of women's rights, following Mao Zedong's slogan that "women hold up half the sky." However, a recent study by Hong Kong-based researchers into articles in the People's Daily, the CPC's official newspaper, reveals a shift in official rhetoric towards portraying women more in domestic and familial roles.

The study, published in Frontiers in Sociology, analysed over 125,000 articles from the People's Daily published between 1990 and 2023. Researchers Jia Wang and Ruiyu Zhang found that the newspaper increasingly associated women with private roles such as family, childbearing, housework, and motherhood, while giving less prominence to public roles like being a "leading woman," "fighter," "career," or "entrepreneur."

The gap between references to women in public and private spheres widened significantly in the late 1990s and reached its peak in 2018. For example, a 2017 article quoted a woman who left her job to stay home when her child entered primary school. However, from 2020, there was a small increase in references to women in public roles.

The researchers suggest this shift could be due to demographic pressures, labour market needs, and international attention to gender equality. Despite this change in rhetoric, women's representation at the highest levels of China's political hierarchy has remained low. There have been no women in the Politburo or the seven-member Politburo Standing Committee since 2022.

Only one woman has served as a provincial party head out of 31. The overall 30% of party membership is also predominantly male, with about 31 million members.

These trends coincide with China's recent efforts to address its demographic challenges. After ending its one-child policy in 2016, China introduced a three-child policy in 2021 to boost birth rates amid a declining population and ageing demographic. However, these policy changes also come with implications for women's employment and gender equality.

A study by the Organisation for Research on China and Asia points out that while China projects global gender equality, it still uses women's reproductive capacities to meet population goals, constraining women's reproductive autonomy. This 'motherhood penalty' leads to lower labour force participation, lower wages, and blocked promotion for women.