Work-lifestyle Preferences Of Female Phds In Mainland China

Female PhD students sometimes are regarded as 'the Third Gender'(hereafter TTG) in mainland China, which was derived from two popular sayings. One is 'there are three genders in the world--male, female and female PhD students'. The other is that female PhDs are 'Miejue Shitai', which is used to describe an fictional unemotional ugly woman reached the highest level of Chinese Kungfu. These anecdotes suggest the feeling of reverence and intolerant for female PhDs.Usually female PhD students graduate at their late 20s or early 30s, which is the best time for birth giving. Sometimes they have to do hard decisions between academia and family. Furthermore, prejudice from the society makes the problems for female PhDs a social problem rather than personal choices.Based on qualitative research, I interviewed nine female PhDs by asking their life experience, career plan and attitudes toward marriage and love in order to investigate their work-lifestyle preference. By doing this, life of female PhDs is expected to be known and understood by more people.Respondents are classified to three types based on the 'Classification of women's work-lifestyle preferences in the 21st century' designed by Dr. Hakim. According to the interviews, eight out of nine respondents choose 'adaptive' type, another chooses career-oriented. Under this circumstance, respondents are classified to adaptive-career, adaptive-family and career-oriented grounding on analysis from transcribes.In the conclusion part, this paper abstracts a table of 'Factors influencing work-lifestyle preference of female PhD students'. Factors are divided into external, internal, positive and negative ones. 'Parents', 'companion' and 'role model' are external factors. 'Research interests' and 'previous academic performance' are internal factors.This paper finds out that both internal and external factors influence work-lifestyle preference of female PhDs. Moreover, Work-lifestyle preference influences respondents' attitude toward gender differences. Respondents who tend to be adaptive-career or career oriented believe that there is no gender difference of intelligence quotient(IQ). Besides, they have more courage to pursue their interests and career. On the contrary, 'adaptive-family' respondents believe that men's IQ are higher than women's. Furthermore, they tend to rely on their companion(or potential companion). Interestingly, they tend to put stress on 'femininity' several times during interviews. Furthermore, academic success that female PhDs achieved is not at the price of family life. Oppositely, support from family is important for female PhDs' academic success.The token of TTG is a social phenomenon which indicates that the society is still patriarchal and intolerant. Based on the existing literature, seldom researchers use qualitative research to focus on work-lifestyle of female PhD students. Therefore, the research can fill in the gap and, through which it provides an in-depth picture of female PhDs that might encourage more female students to pursue academic career.