ورود زنان به خود اشتغالی در مناطق روستایی چین: نقش خانواده در ایجاد الگوهای تحرک جنسیتی

How did family characteristics affect women and men differently in self-employment participation in urban China? Analyses of national data show dual marriage penalties for women. Marketization made married women more vulnerable to lay-offs from state-sector jobs; their likelihood of being pushed into unskilled self-employment surpassed that of any other groups. The revitalized patriarchal family tradition favored men in family businesses and resulted in their higher rates of entering entrepreneurial self-employment. Married women who had the education to pursue entrepreneurial self-employment were constrained by family responsibilities to state-sector jobs for access to family services, and had much lower rates in entering self-employment.

Studies on self-employment in developed countries consistently find that family characteristics—mainly marital status and number of children—have greater effects on women’s participation in self-employment than on men’s (Arum, 1997, Carr, 1996, McManus, 2001 and Renzulli et al., 2000). The effects of marriage and family also vary across occupational classes within self-employment: women enter nonprofessional self-employment to balance work and family, but enter professional self-employment more for career advancement than for family concerns (Budig, 2006). This line of research, however, has been limited to the context of Western developed countries. Little is known about to what extent these findings of family structure’s different effects on men’s and women’s self-employment participation hold true in different cultural and economic contexts. This limited scope has also precluded the investigation of self-employment participation during rapid social change. When rapid social change transforms both the character of self-employment and the role of family, how do family and gender interact to shape people’s entry into the new landscape of self-employment? Contemporary urban China provides an ideal case to extend this line of research along these two directions. In China, not only family relations and gender roles within family are different, self-employment also presents a social and economic reality markedly different from that in developed countries. While self-employment has always existed as a viable employment option in developed countries, it had been largely eliminated in urban China during the Maoist era and only re-emerged as the reform started to transform the socialist planned economy toward a market economy. Entry into self-employment in urban China is not only a departure from wage employment, but also one from the redistributive sector to the emerging market sector. Wage employment in China’s once dominant redistributive sector differed from that in developed market economies, especially in the provision of family-related social services. As the reform transformed the employment structure, it altered both the economic rewards and family-friendliness of various jobs. Therefore, the motivations and constraints that drove people from wage employment to self-employment—especially the effect of family concerns on women’s employment choices—would not only differ from those in developed countries but also evolve as marketization progressed. China’s transition to a market economy brought in changes in family norms and gender relations, chief among them the scaling back of the state’s efforts in creating gender equality in the workplace and a revival of traditional gender roles and division of labor within families. Though we can expect that in China, like elsewhere, women’s labor-market activities are more significantly shaped by their family roles, how exactly gender roles and family relations mediate people’s responses to changes in the employment structure and create gender differences still awaits investigation. Studies on gender differences in labor-market processes in contemporary China have noted the gender-specific effects of family on job mobility patterns. For example, women’s job changes were more motivated by family reasons, but men’s mobility more by career pursuits (Cao & Hu, 2007); only women were negatively affected, in both income and employment status, by marriage and family (Zhang, Hannum, & Wang, 2008); the presence of young children only had negative effects on women’s income, but not men’s (Shu, Zhu, & Zhang, 2007); and, among laid-off workers, marriage lowered women’s probability of re-employment, but not men’s (Du & Dong, 2009). These studies, however, have not examined gender differences in self-employment or the role of family in creating such differences. This paper addresses this gap. We use data from a national survey to examine how family characteristics affect men and women differently in their entry into self-employment during urban China’s market transition over a 19-year span. This paper makes two improvements on past research on self-employment in China. First, this is the first study that uses national representative data to systematically examine gender variations and family effects in entry into self-employment. Second, we disaggregate occupational classes in self-employment and examine the full range of self-employment activities. This helps to better detect gender differences, as women’s participation and the effects of family characteristics may vary across occupational classes in self-employment. Previous studies often focused exclusively on either family business, where the household division of labor often excluded women from taking the leading entrepreneurial role (Bruun, 1993 and Entwisle et al., 1995), or marginalized petty commodity trades, where women outnumbered men (Jacka, 1990). Other more comprehensive studies also failed to address the internal heterogeneity of self-employment or to examine how women’s participation varied across different types of self-employment (Davis, 1999, Wang, 2009 and Wu, 2006).

By transforming the employment structure and care provision in China’s urban economy, the market transition changed both the socioeconomic rewards and family-friendliness of self-employment relative to wage employment. In their responses to these changes, entrants to different occupational positions in self-employment were driven by different sets of motivations and constraints. Those in UISE were more likely constrained by disadvantages in wage employment and entered self-employment to find a refuge from poverty; entrants to SESE, on the other hand, had greater human capital and entered to seek career advancement. People’s responses to these changes, however, were also mediated by their gender roles—especially roles in the family. During the first 19 years of urban China’s market transition, men had higher rates of entering SESE, while married women had higher rates of entering UISE as marketization progressed. We hypothesized that married women’s role as primary caregivers and secondary income earners in the family—together with other gender-related disadvantages—exposed them to greater risks of being laid-off during the state-sector restructuring and would drive more of them into UISE. We also hypothesized that, as the revitalized patriarchal family tradition became more powerful in determining gender division of labor in family businesses, entrepreneurial roles would be reserved for men, resulting in their higher rates of entering SESE. Even for married women who had the human capital to pursue career advancement in self-employment, we hypothesized that care responsibilities in the family would constrain them more to state-sector jobs, where family-related services were more accessible, and make them much less inclined than male counterparts to enter SESE. Statistical analyses confirmed all three hypotheses. These findings differ from those found in developed countries in important ways. Although marriage similarly increased women’s likelihood of entering unskilled self-employment in urban China, as it did to nonprofessional self-employment in the United States (Budig, 2006), the mechanisms that led to such effects were not the same. Women entering professional self-employment in the United States followed a careerist model like their male counterparts (Budig, 2006). In urban China, however, gender difference persisted in this segment of self-employment, and marriage continued to exert powerful constraints on women independent of education, reflecting both the influence of the patriarchal tradition and different institutional settings in the labor market and in provision of social services. These findings make it clear that, although women in general are more constrained by family situations than men, the specific relationship between family status and women’s labor-market processes depends on the cultural and institutional contexts. This research highlights family’s role in mediating the people’s confrontation with social changes and in generating gender-specific outcomes. Previous studies have documented in many ways how family helped create gendered mobility patterns and stratification outcomes during China’s market transition. This study further enriches that knowledge by showing how family roles contributed to the emergence of gender segregation in the self-employment sector of China’s new market economy. Paradoxically, economic liberalization and cultural opening during China’s market transition actually led to increased gender disparities in labor market and more traditional gender division of labor within families. As other scholars suggested (Davis and Harrell, 1993 and Entwisle et al., 1995), this needs to be understood against the background of state-induced changes in labor market and family relations under state socialism. Once the Reform opened up more economic activities and social spaces outside the state’s control and the state scaled back its intrusive reach in people’s private lives, other social forces, especially the cultural traditions that the socialist state had sought to suppress, resurged and gained influence in both public and private spheres. Findings from this study suggest that in urban China’s growing market sector, women entered a new regulatory regime, where the long-standing tradition of patriarchal family corporatism replaced egalitarian state policies, and became a powerful force in defining gender roles and division of labor within families. In this context, employment choices such as entering self-employment became more family strategies and less personal choices, especially for women. The lack of complete retrospective data about spouses’ employment in the data set precluded us from examining in this study how that affected the entry into self-employment and how self-employment was pursued as a family strategy. In the qualitative part of her study of self-employment in urban China, Wang (2009) found that in half of her interviewed sample, both spouses were self-employed—running the small family businesses together; for the rest, the husbands of self-employed women all had wage jobs, while half of the wives of self-employed men had wage jobs and the rest stayed at home. These observations suggest that spouses’ self-employment is likely a factor in motivating the entry into self-employment, especially for women; but this relationship is a complex one, depending on specific characteristics of both spouses’ jobs, self-employed or otherwise. This, and how such family employment strategies were shaped by competing gender norms and family values as market transition further progressed, are areas that call for future research.