Gender dynamics and redundancy in urban China

Abstract

This paper focuses on employment narratives recounted in life history interviews with women workers in Nanjing, China. Drawing on feminist perspectives on gender and global economic changes, it examines the micro-processes that underpinned China's economic restructuring and, through a gender-based analysis, shows how working women lost out in this process. After an overview of the institutional context in which China's economic restructuring occurred, this paper examines women's experiences in the workplace and identifies factors that contributed to their disadvantageous position in the work unit and that increased their vulnerability in the changing labor market. The evidence of gender inequality, assumptions about women's labor capacities, and the gendered consequences of economic restructuring suggest that older, less educated women workers, mostly from the Cultural Revolution generation, are unlikely to gain any benefit from whatever advantages accrue from China's economic integration into the global economy.China, state sector reform, unemployment, gender, qualitative research, JEL Codes: P31, J64, J7,

China's Transition and Feminist Economics

“…In this volume, Liu (2007) explores the life histories of laid-off women workers to show that segregation in low-skilled industrial work prior to reforms not only made women more susceptible to layoffs than men but also made for poorer social connections that weakened their chances of finding jobs commensurate with SOE working conditions. Liu's research, conducted in Nanjing in 2003, offers a glimpse of the experiences that underlie the massive downsizing of the late 1990s and engenders the analysis of the role of social connections in post-redundancy job searches in China.…”

“…In 1997, newly elected Premier Zhu Rongji announced a large-scale labor retrenchment program in an attempt to revitalize the SOE sector. As a result, nearly thirty million workers were laid off between 1998 and 2002 (John Giles, Albert Park, and Fang Cai 2006;Jieyu Liu 2007).…”

An Ocean formed from one hundred rivers: the effects of ethnicity, gender, marriage, and location on labor force participation in urban China

“…Most of the job losses occurred in the state sector where employment levels peaked in 1995 at 109.6 million and then fell dramatically to 78.8 million by 2000 (National Bureau of Table 1-14). Women were disproportionately laid off (Simon Appleton, John Knight, Lina Song, and Qingjie Xia 2002;Margaret Maurer-Fazio 2006;Jieyu Liu 2007, in this volume) and experienced more difficulty finding reemployment in the private sector. Many women became so discouraged that they left the labor force altogether, as evidenced by the sharp decline in their rates of labor force participation (Margaret Maurer-Fazio, James W. Hughes, and Dandan Zhang 2005;John Giles, Albert Park, and Fang Cai 2006).…”

Impact of the Global Financial Crisis in Rural China: Gender, Off-farm Employment, and Wages

“…Older women were particularly affected (Margaret Maurer-Fazio 2006), as women were more likely than men to be subject to forced early retirement (Giles, Park, and Cai 2006a). Once out of the labor force, women exhibited longer unemployment durations and lower reemployment probabilities, due in part to weaker social networks and unequal entitlements to re-employment services (Jieyu Liu 2007;Fenglian Du and Xiao-yuan Dong 2009). 1 And, when they did reenter the labor market, women were less likely than men to recover jobs of the same quality as before -for instance, those with benefits such as health insurance (Giles, Park, and Cai 2006a).…”