The influence of gender on education and job mobility in contemporary China

Why do girls in developing countries fall behind in school, and what are the consequences of their lower enrollment rates? In an effort to understand gender inequalities in educational and occupational outcomes in China, I examine how various community and household contexts condition the experience of Chinese girls and young women, relative to their male counterparts. The primary aims of my work are to understand how and why girls remain disadvantaged in school and how this may affect women's work status later in life.;I use a multi-method approach to investigate the influence of individual, household, school, and community factors on the school and work roles of Chinese adolescents aged 11--17. My quantitative descriptive and statistical analyses draw on data from the 1989 and 1991 waves of the China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS). I complement these quantitative analyses with qualitative data collected in China through two years of participant observation and in-depth interviews with students and teachers. My findings confirm previous results about the influence of gender on education. I also find that residence, household income, and parental background have significant effects on educational enrollment. Additionally, results verify qualitative accounts about the importance of sibling order and bring to light new evidence on the conflicting role of housework demands, especially for girls.;After investigating the determinants of schooling, I investigate whether men and women benefit differentially from education. Using prospective, longitudinal data from the CHNS, I examine job sector mobility in both urban and rural China. I find a surprisingly high amount of mobility during a two year period. The results shed new light on the dynamic process of job mobility underway in the 1990s. Education has strong positive effects on access and movement into the most privileged job sectors. In all cases, although women have lower participation rates in these privileged sectors, they do benefit as much, and sometimes more, from their education as men.