On March 5, Premier Li Keqiang made a government work report, proposing to include the cost of infant and young child care for children under 3 years old in the special additional deduction of personal income tax, develop inclusive childcare services, and reduce the burden of family parenting. Specifically, "inclusive childcare services" refers to the provision of affordable, accessible and quality childcare services as a basic government public service.
The Fourth Survey on the Social Status of Chinese Women (hereinafter referred to as the "Fourth Survey of Women"),published in December 2021 states: "Women bear the primary responsibility for family care. Among them, the daily life care, tutoring homework and transportation of children aged 0-17 were mainly borne by mothers, accounting for 76.1%, 67.5% and 63.6% respectively. Although the burden of female family care is heavy, public service support is insufficient. The proportion of those with children under 3 years of age in the family who have "childcare services" is 35.1%, while only 2.7% of children under 3 years of age are mainly cared for by childcare institutions during the day and 63.7% are cared for by mothers. ”
This survey was jointly organized by the All-China Women's Federation and the National Bureau of Statistics, following the three surveys on the social status of Chinese women in 1990, 2000 and 2010, and once again organized a nationwide survey of important national conditions and women's feelings.
Family care has always been seen as a family affair, but for women primarily responsible for family care, the large amount of unpaid labour time invested, whether in urban or rural areas, has many deep-seated implications for individuals and society. These effects are more from the structural causes of society, so the dilemmas faced by women need to be considered from a broader policy, economic and cultural perspective.
How women's return to their hometowns has become a key force in rural revitalization
Due to the continuous development of urbanization, a large special group of women has emerged in China, returning to their hometowns to start a business and rural left-behind women. According to the Third Survey on the Social Status of Chinese Women, 74.5 per cent of women returned to their hometowns due to marriage and children, compared with 30 per cent of men. Among the many women who have returned to their hometowns, they have already established themselves in the city, and their jobs and incomes are very good, but in order to take care of their children and the elderly, they can only give up their personal development that may be better in the city and choose to return to their hometowns.
Zhang Dongmei (pseudonym) is a native of Shaoguan, Guangdong Province, who worked in Guangzhou after graduating from secondary school, and as early as 2005, her monthly salary reached five or six thousand yuan. However, when she got married and had children, due to the lack of a perfect social security system in the city to support the education and medical care of the children of rural migrants, like many migrant farmers in the city, letting the children return to their hometown to study was a choice that Zhang Dongmei had no choice. Once a left-behind child in rural areas, she did not want her children to experience the pain of left-behind children again, "no matter how difficult it is, I must be by the children's side," she said.
Without much hesitation, Zhang Dongmei gave up a job with a bright future in the city and chose to return to her hometown. However, compared with the cities, rural economic development opportunities and resources are very limited, and for returning women, the occupations available are very simple and the salaries are low. Zhang Dongmei decided to learn sales from scratch and entered a well-known local clothing chain. Due to the experience and advantages accumulated in working in the city, she quickly did a good job, and has been a store manager, managing more than a dozen employees.
The continuous development of the career requires an exponential amount of time, which violates Zhang Dongmei's original intention of deciding to return to her hometown to accompany her children. Watching her daughter's grades keep falling, she was very heartbroken. In order to have more time to accompany her children and tutor their children's learning, she initially offered to be demoted and only worked as a clerk, but this still could not balance the needs of work and child care, so she had to quit the job that she had just done well.
After weighing it up, Zhang Dongmei decided to work in an e-commerce industry with more flexible time, but this was opposed by her husband. Zhang Dongmei, who has always put the happiness of children and the harmony of the family first, has not taken the first step for a long time. Until one time her two-year-old daughter fell seriously ill because she ate bad fruit, she decided to start an agricultural e-commerce. In order to persuade her husband, she actively participated in the ecological agriculture training of the Guangdong Green Shoot Rural Women's Development Foundation (hereinafter referred to as the "Green Shoot Foundation") to learn agricultural techniques and give her husband confidence in his own entrepreneurship.
Zhang Dongmei's husband is a driver, often running long distances outside, and the elderly and children in the family have always been cared for by Zhang Dongmei. Now she has just started farming, only tried to contract 5 acres of land, but it is already very busy. Every morning at 6:30 a.m., I get up to cook and do housework for my children, then go out to look after the orchard, and go home at noon and evening to cook and check my children's homework. At night, after the children go to bed, they will sort out the information on ecological planting in the orchard, review the problems of the day, and consider what to do tomorrow. Zhang Dongmei, who has worked in different industries, sighed: It is really hard to do agriculture!
The Green Shoot Foundation is a public welfare organization that focuses on supporting the development of rural women, and there are many "Zhang Dongmei" they support. These returnees or rural left-behind women often face fewer financial resources, limited development opportunities and abilities, as well as mental loneliness and bitterness. The plight of these rural women, due to the obstacle of concepts and the lack of existing resources, is difficult to solve on their own.
Zou Weiquan, secretary general of the Green Shoot Foundation, as early as 2007-2012, when she was still studying for a doctorate in anthropology at Sun Yat-sen University, she often went to rural remote areas to do fieldwork, and since then she has been very familiar with the current situation of rural development. She later resigned from sun yat-sen university and has been working here since Green Shoot was founded in 2013.
In practical work, Zou Weiquan found that many rural areas lack public cultural life, due to the decline in population, the countryside is becoming more and more desolate, and the spare time of rural women who stay behind and return to their hometowns is almost all spent on mahjong tables. However, these seemingly immutable status quos can sometimes be greatly stimulated by a simple support.
For example, when they found that some rural mothers could not speak Mandarin, could hardly go out to deal with people, and it was very difficult to integrate into the life of the county. So Green Bud invited teachers to teach them to speak Mandarin by reciting poems, which inspired many rural mothers to love poetry, and began to spontaneously organize various interest groups in the exchange group, often discussing word signs and poetry rhymes in the group, and organizing poetry recitation competitions during festivals. Gradually, they also began to create their own poems, and today Green Shoot has received more than 400 poems created by rural women themselves.
This change in psychological state gives them more confidence to develop personal skills and bring financial benefits to their families. Just like another rural woman supported by Green Shoot who encountered family opposition when she decided to start a business, she said to her husband, "I will first learn, change myself, then change you, and finally change our family" . In the end she did, and even she changed the countryside where she lived.
Sister flowers in Shaoguan City, Guangdong Province (Guangdong Green Shoot Rural Women's Development Foundation/Photo)
There are also many non-profit organizations like Green Shoot that specifically support the development of rural women, providing personalized support and solutions according to the different potentials, interests, local resource endowments and community environments of the supporters, and then providing targeted resources according to their own needs.
Such examples are abundant among rural women supported by Green Shoots. In some villages, these left-behind women are not only concerned about the development of their own families, but also actively participate in community public affairs, enrich the spiritual and cultural life of the community, study together, and take care of left-behind schoolchildren and widows and the elderly in the village. In addition to taking care of their families, these rural women are able to achieve personal development, thereby improving the living conditions of individuals and families. With adequate resources and appropriate support, these women can actively participate in the public affairs of rural communities and become a positive force in rural revitalization.
Single mothers are more desperate for both personal career development and parenting responsibilities
In 2019, the China Marriage and Family Research Association, the China Women's Development Foundation and the Vipshop Public Welfare Only Love Mother Project jointly released the "Survey Report on the Living Conditions and Needs of Single Mothers in Ten Cities" (hereinafter referred to as the "Single Mother Survey Report"), more than 80% of single-parent families are single mother families, and their demand for lower-priced professional childcare services (62.7%) and flexible employment time (61.8%), is the strongest demand, followed by the need for career development. This includes vocational competency training (56.1%) and vocational guidance (54.6%).
The "Single Mother Survey Report" estimates that the existing single mothers will reach at least 20 million, which is a very large group. Because they tend to take on parenting responsibilities independently, the contradiction between personal career development and 24-hour parenting makes them face greater challenges than other women. At the same time, due to the pressure of public opinion, many single mothers are reluctant to disclose their single parent identity, especially their children from single-parent families, which makes them more isolated and helpless.
Because public and professional institutions for childcare support are difficult to find, single mothers receive help from personal social networks much more frequently than from public institutions. According to the "Single Mother Survey Report", they are most often asked for help by their parents, accounting for 60%. Among the public institutions that provide support, the largest number of public interest organizations and social groups, accounting for 46.7%.
"Only Love Mom" is one of the public welfare support projects. Let single mothers form "mutual aid groups" to support each other, empower each other, and alleviate the negative emotions accumulated by single mothers in various pains such as divorce, single parenting, and domestic violence. Professional institutions will also be invited to provide professional support to the group, and group courses on different topics such as family healing, solitary parenting, and mutual legal assistance will be carried out for them. In addition, "only love mother" also for single mothers to establish a reliable community mutual aid network, the project leader introduced that the activity of community users is very high, almost an average of 3000-4000 messages per day, and the highest activity time period is generally 1-3 o'clock in the middle of the night.
These mothers need to work and earn money during the day to raise their children, and they have to take care of their children when they go home at night, and the time that really belongs to them is often only the middle of the night. Many single mothers have to abandon stable, secure or high-paying jobs in order to facilitate childcare and shift to precarious, lower-paid, but flexible informal jobs. Among the single mothers supported by "only loving mothers", some open small shops because they can carry their children on their backs all the time, and many can only entrust their children to their parents to take care of them.
The person in charge of the "Only Love Mother" project emphasized that "in the case of solitude, a person takes into account the multiple roles of family and society, and 'time poverty' is a big problem they face, especially there is no time to invest in personal improvement, so compared with other women in the workplace, the income is generally low." The Single Mother Survey Report found that nearly eighty percent (79.9 percent) of single mothers surveyed did not receive adequate child support from their predecessors, and 40.7 percent of them were unable to receive maintenance from their predecessors at all. Loving Mothers strives to provide more accessible and in-depth legal aid to address their pressing financial needs, and in the long run, mothers' own career development can provide a solid and necessary material foundation for themselves and their children.
Yue Hua, an entrepreneur and single mother: "I don't want to be strong, but in the face of reality, I must become stronger." (Vipshop Public Welfare /Photo)
The contradiction between work and parenting is the biggest challenge facing the personal development of single mothers, whether they choose to work or not, they have to make great sacrifices and difficult balances. For them, the country's inclusive childcare policy and preschool education policy will greatly alleviate the dilemma of childcare and work, and the special support of public welfare organizations can insert wings for their long-term personal development.
Create a sustainable, women-friendly future
Women are always used to being called "half the sky", which is also a title that makes women proud. In fact, they often shoulder work and family. According to the Fourth Survey of Women, women account for nearly half of the workers aged 18-64, or 43.5 per cent. Among them, the average total working day of active women is 649 minutes, of which 495 minutes are paid work, and the time of unpaid housework such as caring for family members and cooking/cleaning/daily purchases is 154 minutes, which is about twice that of men.
In fact, this phenomenon is widespread on a global scale. According to Oxfam's 2020 report, Facing the Age of Care, published at davos in 2020, 42% of working-age women globally are excluded from the paid workforce because of their unpaid care responsibilities, compared with 6% of men. For the sake of childcare, mothers are more inclined to choose flexible employment, and many forms of informal employment, including part-time and casual work, become an obstacle to women's access to social security or the accumulation of wealth. As women enter the golden age of labor and childbearing, this gap between men and women will become even larger.
The proposal submitted by the All-China Women's Federation this year pointed out that women have a higher degree of flexibility in employment than men due to childbirth and other reasons, and the degree of enjoyment of social insurance rights and interests is lower than that of men, and they are more likely to fall into difficulties in life due to illness, childbirth, unemployment, and occupational injury. Compared with women in regular employment, women with flexible employment on the platform lack institutional guarantees and policy support in terms of maternity leave, breastfeeding leave, social insurance continuation, and maternity insurance participation, and the way to safeguard their rights and interests also needs to be improved. The ACWF therefore proposes to "broaden the channels for women to find employment and entrepreneurship in the digital economy."
The Standing Committee of the National People's Congress will also deliberate on the Preschool Education Law this year, passing laws to mandate the childcare and education of preschool children aged three years old to enter primary school by preschool institutions such as kindergartens, and emphasizing that preschool education is an important social welfare undertaking and cannot be listed directly or indirectly as an enterprise asset.
To understand the dilemmas faced by adult women under the social structure, we can better understand that the institutional support of national policies, the personalized and diversified support of public welfare institutions, and the increasing attention of the public to the protection of women's rights and interests, and the joint efforts of many parties can provide them with more choices for balancing personal development and parenting care, help them have more confidence and ability, and have more opportunities to achieve a win-win situation in family and career.
Resources:
1. Research Group of the Third Survey on the Social Status of Chinese Women, "Report on the Main Data of the Third Survey on the Social Status of Chinese Women", Women's Studies Series, 2012
2. Research Group of the Fourth Survey on the Social Status of Chinese Women, "Report on the Main Data of the Fourth Survey on the Social Status of Chinese Women", Women's Studies Series, 2021
3. "Planting with Heart, Eating Well: A Record of Rural Sisters' Ecological Agriculture Entrepreneurship", Guangdong Green Shoots Rural Women's Development Foundation, 2020
4. China Marriage and Family Research Association, China Women's Development Foundation, Vipshop Public Welfare Only Love Mother Project, "Only Love Mother Happiness Empowerment Program", "Research Report on the Living Conditions and Needs of Single Mothers in Ten Cities", May 2019
Southern Weekend researcher Xu Fan