Chinese women opting out of the workforce

For many years, staying at home without a formal job was viewed as shameful for women in China; but now a shift in outlook is seeing many urban women publicly expressing a desire to quit the formal workforce.

At the end of 2010, Tencent and Changjiang Daily surveyed over 20,000 women across China about their professional ambitions. An astounding 40 percent said they wanted to be housewives, 38 percent indicated that they wanted to be professionals, while the remainder expressed no preference at all.

A marked change from decades before when Mao declared that women in China hold up half the sky.

Chinese housewives: victims or beneficiaries of market economy?

There are few academic studies on this recent social phenomenon of urban Chinese women opting to work in the home, however, related research offers a small lens into the trend.

In 2005, Shanghai Women’s Association surveyed women’s job preferences, and found that 10 percent of the 1,000 respondents were actively looking to leave their job without a back-up in mind. That number rises to 14 percent among women aged 30 to 39 years old, who cited an inability to balance work and family responsibilities as their main concern.

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There has been little follow-up research to the 2005 study, but across Shanghai there's ample anecdotal evidence that young women in the prime of their career climb are frustrated with their current situation.

“I feel increasing pressures to balance work and family since being promoted last year,” says Vivian Zhang, a 37-year-old woman with a Shanghai-based securities firm. “Many of my friends share the same feeling.

"Every single time we hear of someone becoming a housewife and escaping from the stressful but meaningless working environment in Shanghai, we're envious. We all think she is very lucky.”

Some housewife friends of mine say their kids ask them to dress as though they were coming from work to pick them up from school. The kids feel like they lose face when other kids find out that moms have nothing to do. — Sandy Luo, working mom

“Generally, women’s ambitions for their careers are reduced by marriage; for men, it's exactly the opposite,” explains labor and human resources Professor Pan Jintang from Renmin University.

“But well-educated women stopping their careers after marriage is a new phenomenon, which was created by China’s transition to market economy in 1990s.”

According to Professor Pan, during China’s planned economy period the government controlled everything, from jobs to manufactures’ sales channels, which created a stress-less working environment, and an abnormal female labor force participation rate -- around 80 percent -- one of the highest in the world.

Vivian Zhang still remembers that when she was little, her mother never worked overtime and had a lot of spare time during office hours to dote on her.

“I don’t think she needed to quit [to raise me]," recalls Zhang. "Although she didn't work hard, she wasn't at risk of being fired. And those who worked harder didn’t earn much more than her.” 

However, the market economy changed everything.

When competition between companies started in 1990s, many employees lost their jobs, and almost 60 percent of those newly unemployed were women.

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“Some lost their jobs, and today others have to work harder,” says Pan, “thus creating a situation where well-educated women want to quit the workforce to seek for an easier lifestyle or to look after their families.”

Beryl Wang, who graduated from Shanghai's renowned Fudan University 10 years ago, chose to work in a minor support role at a multinational company after giving birth and since then has cut out work completely.

“It’s obvious why women are scaling back -- if there's no help from your kid's grandparents and no place to watch them, either the father or the mother needs to make some sacrifices,” says Wang. “For example, someone needs to reduce the number of business trips. Generally, women make these sacrifices voluntarily.”

These kinds of "sacrifices" on the job often create a salary gap between working spouses, which are sometimes drastic enough that it makes sense, as in Wang’s situation, for one parent to stay at home.

When Wang and her husband realized that one of them needed to stay at home when their daughter entered primary school, it was an easy choice for Wang to make.

“My husband earns four times more than I do. If it was the opposite, he would be a stay-at-home father, but it’s not how things work,” she says.

While some made sacrifices, others benefited from the market economy.

“Some women in my generation also wanted to be stay-at-home moms, but they couldn’t realize this dream,” says Lu Ying, a 67-year-old professor at the Women and Gender Research Center of Zhongshan University.

Before the 1990s, China adhered to an urban labor policy dubbed “low salary, more jobs” ("低收入, 广就业"), which aimed to help avoid unemployment in the country with an historic excess labor supply.

“That policy kept wages low so it was almost impossible to rely on only one partner’s salary,” explains Lu. “But the market economy reform created some super rich, and, in recent years, helped the middle class emerge in large cities like Shanghai, and thus offered women the choice to stay at home.”