Sex Ratio Imbalance, Female Family And Labor Market Bargaining Power

The status of women has changed fundamentally and women began to enjoy the same status and rights as their male counterparts since the founding of The People’s Republic of China. In pace with the large-scale changes brought by the implementation of reform and open policy, the population structure in China has also experienced profound changes. Also, the intra-household allocation of resources and women’s social status had also changed dramatically. The problem of sex ratio imbalance in China has become more and more severe in recent years. The impacts of such imbalance on Chinese households and society, specifically, on women’s intra-household bargaining power and performance on the labor market formed the core problems to be solved in this article.From the predictions of Nash bargaining model, I supposed that sex ratio imbalance increased women’s "threat point" during the process of intra-household bargaining by increasing women’s external choices in the marriage market and their performance in the labor market. Intuitively, the population structure of much more male than female put women in a situation where they were relatively scarce, thus resulting competition between unmarried males on marriage market and competition between employers searching for female employees on labor market. The saying "Singular things are always dear" also works in process of intra-household bargaining and labor market bargaining.Based on the data from China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS), the theoretical predictions were tested in this article. The regressions mainly tested the relationship between local sex ratio with the distribution of housework, with Hypertension and several other life stress-related diseases prevalence, with female education level. By the empirical results above, the relationship between sex ratio and female’s intra-household bargaining power was tested. Also, other regressions were done to detect the impacts of sex ratio on women’s performance in major occupation, including regressions with women’s major occupation type, women’s career rank in major occupation, whether she has regular wages as dependent variable respectively. In addition, in the regressions with several variables measuring the intra-household bargaining power as dependent variables, occupation-related variables were controlled to test the effects of women’s career performance on their intra-household bargaining power.The empirical evidences show that in areas where sex ratio imbalance appears to be more severe, women tend to bear less housework, receive more education and there are less prevalence of Hypertension and several other life stress-related diseases. These evidences support the first main conclusion of this article:sex ratio imbalance increases females’ intra-household bargaining power. What’s more, the empirical results also show that in areas with more severe sex ratio imbalance, women are more likely to take more professional occupations with higher social status and higher income, supporting the second main conclusion of this article:sex ratio imbalance improves women’s performance on labor market. In addition, it is found that occupation-related variables significantly affect females’ intra-household bargaining power, which serves as evidence for the third conclusion of this article:females’ enhanced performance on labor market increases their intra-household bargaining power. IV and other robust check prove the results robust.