Women and the Chinese Labor Market: Recent Patterns and Future Possibilities

While many economists have advanced potential future growth strategies for the Chinese economy, none to our knowledge have done so with a specific consideration of the impacts these policies may have on women’s welfare measured in terms of labor market outcomes. In this article, we first discuss the relative status of women’s position in the Chinese labor force from the perspective of their employment levels, occupational segregation, and wages. We then calculate segregation indices and present and interpret recent employment data from the National Bureau of Statistics of China to consider how the labor market has evolved for women in the last decade. Interestingly, we find that occupational segregation by gender has in fact intensified since the onset of the radical reforms in China in the mid-1990s. Next, we contribute to the literature by evaluating potential growth policies for their impacts on women’s relative welfare in terms of labor market outcomes using our unique criteria for evaluation. We find that switching to a service-centered growth strategy could work to increase women’s relative welfare if implemented concurrently with additional policies aimed at reducing the otherwise potential negative implications for women’s relative welfare. Finally, we provide our own gender sensitive growth strategy suggestions which include our argument that an education-led growth strategy, for example, may have the largest positive impact on both the Chinese economy and women’s relative welfare.