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Why do Chinese adolescent girls outperform boys in achievement test s?

Xiaorong Gu1, Wei-jun Jean Yeung2, 3, 4

Abstract

The current study extends our understanding of the widely documented gender educational gap in favor of females and its contributing factors through a mixed-methods analysis of the Chinese case. We develop an analytical framework that incorporates three mechanisms—intergenerational social contract, non-cognitive skills, and cumulative (dis)advantage across the life course—to empirically assess gendered achievement patterns and their social mechanisms among Chinese adolescents. The Chinese Family Panel Studies data documented that adolescent girls have higher verbal and math achievements than boys, with the gap larger in verbal than in math scores. Three factors account for these gender gaps: (1) (grand)parents hold higher expectations for girls, monitor girls more closely, and invest in girls as much as in boys; (2) girls possess better non-cognitive skills; and (3) girls’ stronger performance in earlier years gives them an edge for later achievement. The in-depth interviews contextualize these statistical patterns in profound changes in families’ logic in supporting girls’ education and in reconfigured gender discourses about girls’ learning behavior. From the perspective of intergenerational contracts, in the context of low fertility, daughters have become cherished as long-term family members at the receiving end of intensive investment, particularly as educational competition intensifies in post-reform China. Moreover, a gender discourse, engaged by family members and teachers, about girls’ superior non-cognitive skills such as compliance and self-discipline exerts a powerful influence as a self-fulfilling prophecy with regards to girls’ achievement. The findings underscore the need to account for both cultural and policy contexts, and nuanced gender work at home and in school in understanding the gender-gap reversal in contemporary China.

Keywords : Gender, education, adolescents, post-reform China, social stratification

pp. 109-137

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Hope and anxiety: The study of female embodied experience with assisted reproductive technology

Chengpu Yu1, Wanlin Li2, Mingfen Deng3

1 School of Sociology and Anthropology, Sun Yat-sen University, China

2 School of Sociology and Anthropology, Sun Yat-sen University, China

3 The First Affiliated Hospital, Sun Yat-sen University, China

Abstract

Assisted reproductive technology (ART) is hailed as “the holy grail” for infertile patients in the mainstream narrative. The existing studies have clearly demonstrated how external social factors shape how ART is to be used, but they ignore the recipients of the technologies, and especially the experiences of women. Based on an investigation conducted in Z hospital’s reproductive center, this article regards embodiment as the methodological orientation for integrating socio-cultural context with female embodied experience in order to show their bio-social entanglement. As fieldwork evidence indicates, ART in practice is far from simple “hope technology”; instead, it throws women into a paradoxical world in which hope and anxiety coexist. Embodied experience, hope, and anxiety are transmitted through the bodies of women, which reveals the inscription of social-cultural context and technical uncertainty on the female body and, meanwhile, women actively learn strategies by which to cope with the technical uncertainty and moral pressures from local culture (including healing the body, folk religion, etc.), so as to hold onto infertility treatment with hope.

Keywords : Assisted reproductive technology, in vitro fertilization (IVF), embryo transfer (ET), embodiment, embodied experience

pp. 138-170

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Women’s perceived support of parents and parents-in-law in China: Socioeconomic resources, reciprocity, and family context

Trevor Tsz-lok Lee1, Xing Luo2

1 Department of Education Policy and Leadership, The Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

2 The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

Abstract

Filial support has been recognized as a main source of social support for China’s aging population. While traditional Chinese families generally adhere to patrilineal, patriarchal, and patrilocal principles, there have been signs of an emerging trend of a complex, bilateral family system that has influenced the ways in which married women support elderly family members, both natal kin and in-laws, in contemporary China. However, little research exists focusing on the perspectives of married women in China on intergenerational support. Drawing on nationally representative data from the Chinese General Social Survey, this study investigates the patterns and determinants of women’s financial and instrumental support of their parents and parents-in-law in China. The main results show that, while education and income separately affect women’s support patterns, their husband’s income level is the crucial factor determining women’s financial support for parents and parents-in-law. In terms of instrumental support, norms of reciprocity are evident between women and parents/parents-in-law. Despite a positive association between financial support that women give to parents-in-law and that which they receive from parents-in-law, women’s financial support tends to be less frequent when their own parents have financially supported them. The implications of these findings for our understanding of intergenerational support mechanisms and for future research are discussed.

Keywords : Intergenerational support, filial piety, married women, socioeconomic resources, reciprocity, family context

pp. 171-193

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Cohort dynamics in relation to gender attitudes in China

Mengsha Luo

Department of Sociology, Zhejiang University, China

Abstract

China has undergone extensive changes since its transition from the socialist era to the reform era in 1978. It is said there was a revival of traditional gender ideologies in the reform era. Nonetheless, individuals’ socioeconomic status improved greatly, and according to cohort replacement theory and interest- and exposure-based theories, this should imply progress in gender attitudes. Drawing on nationwide repeated cross-sectional data from the 2010–2015 Chinese General Social Survey (N = 44,900), this study explores changes in gender attitudes in relation to cohort in China. Sex-stratified hierarchical age–period–cohort cross-classified random-effects models are used to (a) explore cohort differences in attitude for four gender norm dimensions (ability and work dimensions in the public sphere and division of labor and marriage dimensions in the private sphere), and across three cohort groups, that is, the “war baby” (born 1926–1948), the “pre-reform baby” (born 1949–1977), and the “reform baby” (born 1978–1995) groups, and (b) examine how cohort differences in relation to each attitude have been modified by socioeconomic status and demographic characteristics, and how men’s and women’s gender attitudes are influenced in different ways by these factors. The results reveal the uneven pace of development toward egalitarian gender ideologies in China, with respondents being more supportive of egalitarianism in the public sphere than in the private sphere. Although the movement toward greater gender egalitarianism in the public sphere started from the pre-reform baby cohort, the movement in the private sphere began to emerge only in the reform baby cohort. Additionally, the sex gap in gender attitudes widened and peaked in the reform baby cohort. Women’s attitudes were influenced to a greater extent by socioeconomic and demographic factors than men’s.

Keywords : Gender norms, sex-role attitudes, gender ideology, gender essentialism

pp. 194-216

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Returning life to society: Biography as a narrative of the whole

‍ ‍ ‍ ‍ ‍ Bingxiang Zhao

School of Sociology, China University of Political Science and Law, China

Abstract

Biography is a unique form of narration in ethnography and historiography. This article attempts to position Lin Yueh-Hwa’s works within the context of sociological and anthropological debate since the 1920s. In doing so it explores the potential uses of the biographical method in the study of Chinese history and society. Although Lin was a bearer of the biographical tradition of Chinese literature and history, his works were also profoundly influenced by both the narrative method of life history in the United States and social-life studies in France. In addition to these two influential biographical traditions, anthropologists in Britain developed the genealogical approach to investigating sacred kingship. This study regards these three traditions of individual-life biography, social-life studies and genealogy as a “biographic triad”. Relevant works in contemporary Chinese sociology and anthropology are reviewed within this framework. It is conceivable that phenomenological description alone is insufficient when applying the biographical method. One must take into consideration Chinese centralized power and the overall social structure of China. Only by placing “life biography” against society’s ever-changing processes can one turn individual stories into powerful narratives depicting the whole structure of Chinese social life.

Keywords : Biography, life history, genealogical method, social structure, conjuncture

pp. 217-251

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Enterprising and lost: Professional lives of programmer interns

Chadwick Wang1, Kunyun Yang2

1 Department of the History of Science, Tsinghua University, China

2 Center for Science, Technology and Society, Tsinghua University, China

Abstract

Programmer interns are a distinctive group of precarious laborers. They undertake the same jobs as junior programmers with formal employment, while suffering from high pressure and earning low pay. Still, they are convinced that only a long-term internship can keep them on the right track of professional career development. We explore their consent-making through six months of fieldwork in an internet company, and propose the “enterprising-self” game to explain their subjective orientations. In the enterprising-self game, programmer interns become accustomed to identifying themselves with a particular type of quantifiable labor product, for instance, the positioning of “their” sticky notes on company whiteboards and the expected “T-levels” that represent their employability in the industry, by which their enterprising self is a by-product. Programmer interns seems to believe that, rather than higher education, state-owned enterprises, or multinational enterprises, only domestic internet companies can help them attain their enterprising selves. Even though the supervisor–intern relationship and the “gender game” of masculinity performance constitute part of the programmer interns’ enterprising-self game, the essence of the game has never been challenged and in some ways is only being reinforced. Though only a few lucky employees can win the game by attaining promotion to the senior engineer or management level, most of them still get lost in the “periodic” and “imperceptible” time of life as a programmer, which is characterized by full devotion to the company, until the “35-year-old crisis”.