Investigating China’s "Stalled Revolution": Husband and Wife Involvement in Housework in the PRC

Juhua Yang, Brown University
Susan E. Short, Brown University

China’s socialist revolution is credited with improving the status of women. In promoting the socialist agenda, leaders emphasized women’s labor in China’s drive to modernize; as half the population, women had much to contribute. Today female labor force participation rates are high. Yet, while expectations for gender-neutral work outside the house were cultivated, in the arena of household work, expectations remained highly gendered. Thus, while women shifted into outside work, men did not shift into domestic work. The situation mirrors what Hochschild (1989) observed in the 1980s among couples in the U.S. --- a “stalled revolution.” This paper investigates factors associated with couple division of housework using China Health and Nutrition Survey data. Results suggest that fifty years after the onset of the communist revolution, housework remains highly gendered. Nonetheless, gender equity in housework is sensitive to education, occupation, and other factors that are changing rapidly in today’s China.