Unraveling the Stalled Gender Revolution: An Investigation of Women’s Narratives, Family Structures, and Micro-Level Gender Dynamics in Chinese Households

Gender inequality operates differently across various families in China. For example, previous research suggests that the motherhood penalty is most pronounced in patrilocal families, nil in matrilocal families (where married couples live with the wife’s parents), and moderate in nuclear families (where married couples live with the husband’s parents) (Yu and Xie 2018). However, it remains unclear how family dynamics intersect with gender in shaping individual outcomes in Chinese households. Accordingly, in this dissertation, I provide a systematic examination of this question with a mixed-methods approach. I start by examining how living in extended families reduces women’s total housework burdens (Ta et al. 2019), yet also exacerbates the gender gap (Hu and Mu 2021). Drawing on 38 in-depth interviews with married Chinese women, I find that women’s goal of making life manageable precipitates their choices of extended families, as a viable solution to navigate their work-family conflicts. This goal, however, directs their attention from the gender gap in domestic labor and fosters everyday interactions suppressing women’s intentions to resist the unequal housework division. The second chapter continues the exploration of variation in family dynamics, but is more focused on the effects of this variation on individual outcomes. Based on analyses of six-year nationally representative datasets, I find that it is necessary to make a distinction between patrilocal and matrilocal extended families. This is because the former is associated with people’s increased fertility intentions whereas the latter is related to decreased fertility intentions, as compared to nuclear families. Such an important variation is concealed if researchers combine patrilocal and matrilocal families into one category. Building on knowledge of the first two chapters, the third chapter foregrounds women’s agency to explore how they navigate the gender and family dynamics in Chinese households. Drawing on interviews with 40 married Chinese women, I show that women express an individualist ethos of self-reliance in domestics labor, rejecting the idea that their household responsibility is a result of gendered subordination. They do so by reconstructing gender status differences and reviving meanings of family works at narrative levels. Such narratives allow them to build an alternative, more reconciled story of gender inequality that they are, in fact, unable to challenge. These three chapters, although have different focuses, all contribute to a comprehensive understanding of individuals’ lives at the intersection of gender and family dynamics in a social context where gender inequality remains entrenched. In conclusion, I demonstrate how these three articles advance our knowledge of 1) individuals’ struggles between conflicting or even competing ideologies in everyday life, and 2) the connections between individual outcomes at the micro-level and social factors at the macro level.