One Child Family Structure and Gender Equality Attitudes

The cultural transition about gender is the required but insufficient condition for gender equality promoting. And the collection of individuals' gender equality attitudes within a certain society would affect on gender related cultures. Therefore, it's significant on which factors influence individual level gender equality ideology. The research hypothesis here is: under the influence of birth control policy in China, the sex combination and number of children in the family interact with other factors and affect on parents' gender equality ideology. In the only girl families, the parents have the highest level of equality attitudes. The research combines qualitative and quantitative methods. Measuring gender equality attitudes by 14 indicators and exploring the attitudes affecting mechanism by in-depth interview. Totally 47 parents and 17 children respondents were interviewed in 5 areas. The dissertation includes 6 chapters. The introduction part presents the background and methods of research. The first chapter describes the concept and measurement methods of dependent variable---gender equality attitudes. Then the independent variable---the sex and number of children in family is involved in the second chapter. The next part shows the result of quantitative measurement, and interprets the detailed arguments on gender equality of the respondents. The causal relation and mechanism between children's sex and gender equality ideology of their parents is explained in the fourth chapter. And the next part involves the children's gender attitudes to explore the ideology duplication between different generations. At the end of the research, the further discussion of children's attitudes is explored. Through analyzing this we try to understand if there is an attidutes copied from older generation to younger generation. The conclusion of the dissertation is that people---especially mothers who preferred boys but only got girl(s) actually would have higher gender equality attitudes than other parents.The mechanism is: birth control policy results in a change on the number and consequently sex combination of children in families. Therefore many parents who preferred boy(s) only got girl(s). In these only girl(s) families, there are at least two differences from families with boy(s): first, the gender convergence emerged more easily in girls' families than in other types of families, especially when there are male siblings as counterparts. Second, only daughters' parents' boy preference has been weaken by their daughters' care and benefits from both emotional and material aspects. The last but not least, the "benefits-oriented" birth contral and pension policies help parents to strengthen their gender-neutral attitudes towards daughters. One point noticeable is that birth control policy is not the only and best measure to keep the positive trend on parents' gender attitudes, but a background of the research. In order to promote and consolidate gender equality, both cutrural transition and changes in formal institutions are must in the future.