According to the International Labour Organization, China's labor force participation rate for women aged 15-64 fell from 11th in 2000 to 51st in 2022. In 2022, among the top 15 countries in terms of global GDP, China ranked 8th in terms of female labor force participation, with the largest decline among the 15 countries.
Zhang Dandan, a professor of economics at Peking University's National School of Development, has long studied the direction of domestic labor economy and health economy, focusing on vulnerable groups in the transition period in China. She began researching the decline in the domestic female labor force participation rate in 2015 and found that from 1982 to 2020, the domestic female labor force participation rate fell by 22%, which was faster and more widespread than the male labor force participation rate that fell by 16% during the same period.
After the outbreak of the new crown epidemic in 2020, Zhang Dandan initiated a study on the impact of the epidemic on the domestic labor market. Through data analysis, it was found that "compared with the male labor force, the female labor force has a higher unemployment rate, slower progress to return to work, and is more likely to work from home." Among them, the labor market position of married women with minor children within the family has declined more significantly, and "the burden of family care is an important factor that leads to women's workplace losses."
While the data in the studies are not updated in real time, these studies, together with the international discussion of the "she-cession" in recent years, show a situation in which women are working today, remind us of this inequality, and try to find ways to close the gap.
The following content is based on Zhang Dandan's oral and published articles.
Reporter |
The labor force participation rate of women in mainland China is declining faster than that of men
Since 2015, I have been following and researching the changes in the labor force participation rate in the country, as well as the gender differences in this change. Using the data of the previous Chinese censuses of the National Bureau of Statistics, we conclude that in the nearly 40 years from 1982 to 2020, among the working-age population aged 15-65, the female labor force participation rate fell from 77% to 55%, and the male labor force participation rate fell from 92% to 76%, with a gender difference of 6%. This is in line with the International Labour Organization's statistics on the decline in China's female labor force participation rate.
Let's talk about the premise of this data decline first. Compared with the rest of the world, the domestic labor force participation rate has fallen from a very high value to a normal level, and the labor force participation rate in other countries, especially the female labor force participation rate, has risen in recent years, which is basically the same as China's declining data. So it's not that the labor force participation rate of women in our country is declining faster than that of men, but that the labor force participation rate of women is low, and we are equivalent to returning to a normal level compared to other countries.
The reason behind this, you can recall that before the 80s of the last century, the labor force in the era of the planned economy was rarely not involved in employment, or unemployed, and the labor force participation rate was extremely high. In our subsequent research, we also found that 2000 was a point when China's labor force participation rate began to decline, when the private sector accounted for a higher proportion of the domestic labor market, and the female labor force participation rate began to decline after marketization, so the decline in the female labor force participation rate mainly occurred after 2000.
Why did there be such a change, why did there be such a gap between women's labor force participation rate and men's, how did women's labor force participation rate differ from generation to generation? These questions were very few convincing explanations in China at that time. But this is indeed a real phenomenon and a problem.
In addition to using the data from previous censuses of the National Bureau of Statistics for analysis, in 2015 my collaborators and I began to try to use experimental economics to answer this difficult question. We have chosen groups of people born in Beijing from different generations. These groups are mainly concentrated in urban areas, as most of the national statistics of the year were also in urban areas. We wanted to analyze their willingness to compete through questionnaires and game settings, so as to reflect the willingness of men and women of different generations to participate in the labor force. The three generations, born in 1958, 1966 and 1977, were born in the era of economic reform, with a sample of 100 people from each group.
The results of the analysis show that there are significant generational differences in the decline of the labor force participation rate. Women born in 1958 had the highest labor force participation rate and were even more willing to compete than men in the same period, while women born in 1966 had a slightly lower labor force participation rate and women born after 1977 had the lowest labor force participation rate. For example, just like a glass of water, there are people of that generation entering at each point in time, and these people's willingness to participate is different, so the concentration of this glass of water is different at different times.
A more definite explanation for the reason is that exposure to different institutional/social norms at a critical developmental age can significantly alter the person's behavior, willingness to compete, and thus affect his/her level of labor participation.
For example, women born in the 1958s were born after the new Marriage Act was amended in 1950, when the status of women was improved. When they reached the age of growth and development, it was during the Cultural Revolution, when the propaganda slogans on gender concepts overthrew the Confucian principle of male superiority and inferiority of women, three obedience and four virtues, emphasizing that "women can hold up half the sky", women can also fly airplanes and burn boilers, and society seems to be less tolerant of people who can work but choose not to work, this ideology has reached its peak. In our experiment, women born in the 1958s were highly willing to work and more competitive than men. By the 1966 generation, they had begun to experience economic reforms in junior high school and their political propaganda slogans weakened, so we observed a slight decline in women's labor force participation among this generation. The 1977 generation, too, experienced market-oriented changes and rapid economic growth in China, the ideological influence of "individualism" began to strengthen, and some of the old traditions that had been overthrown returned, which inevitably affected women's willingness to compete, and even significantly reduced the labor force participation rate.
As a contrast, we also selected the same three generations of Chinese Taipei women as a comparison group in the study, Beijing and Taipei share the roots of Confucian cultural traditions, but Taipei has not experienced significant cultural and institutional changes. The analysis shows that women in Chinese Taipei are not as willing to compete as in the mainland in the early days, but because they are completely influenced by the market economy and accept the social norms of developed countries, the female labor force participation rate has slowly increased, and its change trend is close to that of other countries, and finally it is similar to the female labor force participation rate in the mainland.
For now, we remain concerned about the domestic labor force participation rate. Some new findings are that the largest decline in the labor force participation rate over the past four decades has occurred among those at both ends of the labor force age – young people aged 16-24 and urban seniors aged 51-65.
The largest decrease in the labor force participation rate of young people is related to the 40 years of education policies such as "compulsory education reform" and "expansion of college enrollment". However, it should be noted that after removing the "school students", the labor force participation rate of the young group is still significantly declining, which may indicate that China has formed a "not in education, employment, or training" NEET (NEET) group. On the other hand, the labor force participation rate of those over 50 years old has declined, but the trend is opposite from the perspective of urban and rural areas: the labor force participation rate of the elderly working population in rural areas has increased significantly, while the labor force participation rate of the elderly population in urban areas has decreased significantly, and this difference is partly related to the urban compulsory retirement system.
The pandemic has exacerbated gender inequality in the labor market
I have been interested in gender issues since my master's degree, and for more than 20 years now, gender issues have been one of my research areas. For example, the issue of unemployment, in recent years, there has been a lot of discussion in China about the high youth unemployment rate, and there was also a wave of laid-off unemployment in China around 2000, when my master's thesis focused on laid-off female workers, and the theme was the dynamic change of the income gap between men and women. When I entered academia, I focused on groups that were overlooked, even statistically disadvantaged, who were easily overlooked by policymakers, but who were the majority, and someone had to highlight their existence. For example, left-behind groups, floating populations, women, etc. Coupled with the fact that I am a woman, a left-behind child when I was a child, and now a mother of two children, I instinctively want to understand the situation of these groups and the economic and social issues behind them. But this part of the study is usually not easy to do, there is not enough data, and you need to collect it yourself, so the research period will be very long.
In January 2020, the new crown pneumonia epidemic broke out in China, initially with the lockdown of Wuhan, and later other cities implemented different degrees of lockdown. I was in Beijing, and the community was also in lockdown, but I couldn't stay at home at that time, because I realized that this kind of lockdown is extremely rare, and it has caused an almost complete shutdown of the economy for a short period of time, and the economy has affected people's livelihoods and everyone. As an economist, I can't resist the urge to do research in this area, and there are so many perspectives worth studying about the impact of the epidemic on the domestic job market, including gender perspectives, the division of time within the family, internal conflicts, and so on. I later discovered that these studies also echoed the decline in women's labor force participation, which in the context of the global public crisis of the pandemic, in fact, highlighted the inequality of the labor market.
At that time, there was no international talk of "she-cession" caused by the epidemic, and even now, there are few articles in China in which research teams collect a large sample size and analyze the impact of the epidemic on the female labor market. I started this research in earnest after the lockdown of Wuhan on January 23, 2020.
It's all about crossing the river by feeling the stones. Since I can only do surveys and experiments online, I hope that the sample size is large enough to finally decide to cooperate with the Tencent Think Tank platform. The good thing about this platform is that it can target the target of the survey. For example, I need to find the labor force that was still working before the epidemic in 2019, and I want to know how many people in the working group are unemployed, suspended, when they will return to work, etc., and I need to lock down specific groups. The delivery of the questionnaire and the payment method also determine the success or failure of the survey, and we use WeChat to deliver the questionnaire with the help of WeChat, which is very easy to operate for online surveys.
At the beginning of March 2020, I sent out my first questionnaire to more than 10,000 people, and effectively collected more than 5,800 samples from previous practitioners. The sample is almost evenly proportioned and contains information on 3,512 married households, covering all walks of life in 325 cities in China, taking into account both rural and rural areas as much as possible. I followed up with follow-up surveys in June and December, basically covering the work information before, during and after the epidemic eased. Starting in June, the questionnaire has added information on the work status of married spouses and the division of labor in the family, hoping to understand the differences between husband and wife in the labor market at the household level.
At the end of 2020, after the data collection was completed, we found that, overall, the female workforce had a higher unemployment rate, a slower return to work, and a greater likelihood of working from home than the male workforce. At the end of 2020, the proportion of female workers who were unemployed or dropped out of the labour market increased by 6.1 percentage points relative to men. The weekly working hours were significantly reduced by 3.7 hours, and the monthly wage was lost by 462 yuan. 28% of women and 16.4% of men have been unemployed for more than half a year. The proportion of women working from home is higher, especially in the first half of 2020, when the proportion of women working from home was 25-35% higher than that of men.
This result is explained by two main factors: first, the economic downturn brought about by the pandemic has mainly hit service work, which is dominated by women, and second, women are more likely to sacrifice their jobs to care for their families, leading to fewer working hours, unemployment, and an increase in the proportion of people who drop out of the labor market.
Through the regression analysis of the data within the family, we find that the difference in the distribution of occupations and industries is not the main reason why women are at a disadvantage in employment, but the key is that marriage and minor children will exacerbate women's inequality in the workplace. During the epidemic, the family cooperation model of "male dominance and female dominance" was more obvious. Wives are less likely than husbands to return to work, lose their jobs or exit the labour market, and having children under the age of six further exacerbates the vulnerability of working mothers. Wives have taken on more housework during the pandemic year, especially spending more time with their children's studies, while wives are significantly less involved in social activities, spending less time online and exercising with their husbands.
In exceptional cases, such as a wife with a higher level of income or human capital than her husband, the difference in domestic labor participation with her husband can be reversed, but this does not mean that the wife's working hours are reduced. If a wife has children under the age of six, even if she has "strong bargaining power", it is almost impossible to reduce her burden of family care.
Finally, at the mental health level, we found that women's overall mental health levels were significantly lower than men's, and married working mothers experienced a greater mental health shock. There is another data that I didn't put in the article, which is that the number of suicides among men is slightly higher than that of women during the epidemic, which does not seem to match the results of our previous analysis, but if you look at the growth rate, the increase in suicides among women during the epidemic is greater than that of men, which can also support women's mental health problems from one side.
To be honest, the data is generally similar to me, and to the women around me. I remember that after the data collection was over, I wrote an article and forwarded it to the circle of friends. Many people around me came to me and told me about the sacrifice, powerlessness, and struggle they felt in their families. There is also a part that is beyond my imagination, it is the data collected in December 2020, when the domestic epidemic slowed down, the economic data of the whole country was not bad, and the unemployment rate was not high, but I did not expect that there were still many women who were unemployed, did not return to work, and became housewives, which surprised me a little. In the face of a major public crisis, women are more easily, or more likely to be forced to make concessions.
The data collection in this study ended at the end of 2020, and I did not continue to compare data from later years. Now the research on the epidemic may be more sensitive, and it is not the mainstream of current attention, and the article is not easy to publish. But looking back at these data, and thinking about the low marriage and childbirth rate around us, the decline in women's labor force participation rate is actually related.
Over the years, I have studied inequality in China's labor market, and one of the reasons for the decline in women's labor force participation rate is to find ways to help narrow the gender gap in the labor market. Whether it's cultivating a sense of femininity culturally/normatively, or focusing on women's needs in terms of social services (e.g., providing more flexible working schedules, affordable childcare), or even family members paying more attention to the weaker side of the family, this is an option to consider.
The reference article comes from the article of Zhang Dandan and collaborators:
“Gender Differences in Willingness to Compete: The Role of Culture and Institutions” (with Alison Booth, Elliott Fan and Xin Meng),Economic Journal, 2019, Volume 129, 618(1): 734-764.
“Working mothers’ dilemma during the COVID-19 pandemic: Evidence from China” (with Yiling Zhao and Yaxuan Liu) ,China Economic Review, 2024，Volume 84，102132.
Source of this article: "Sanlian Life Weekly"
![The famous mouth Zhang Dandan has changed so much, and Li Rui is in the same frame to make a fortune obvious, and he has choked Lu Yu la Hei Xie Na[fig]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAP///wAAACwAAAAAAQABAAACAkQBADs=)