Why Do Female Migrant Workers Have More Positive Social Attitudes Than Male Migrant Workers

Along with the urbanization process of Chinese society,the migrant worker group has gradually become the main body of the Chinese working class.One interesting phenomenon of the social attitudes of migrant workers is that a large amount of empirical evidence using gender as an explanatory or control variable shows that female migrant workers are more positive than male migrant workers in almost all dimensions of social attitudes.Based on the perspective of relative differences in social discrimination,this paper attempts to provide an explanation for the more positive social attitudes of female migrant workers compared to male migrant workers based on two dimensions: gender differences in identity discrimination and urban-rural differences in gender discrimination.This paper examines the difference between the identity discrimination dimension and the gender discrimination dimension using the wage difference decomposition method,and finds that the identity discrimination of female migrant workers in urban society is smaller than the identity discrimination of male migrant workers;the gender discrimination of female migrant workers in urban society is smaller than the gender discrimination inherent in urban society for urban women,which means that the gender discrimination of female migrant workers in urban society is smaller than that of women in rural This means that gender discrimination against female migrant workers in urban society is smaller than that against women in rural areas.This paper analyzes the possible reasons for the above empirical facts,and concludes that the gender difference in status discrimination,the "mate selection gradient" effect in the marriage market,the professional image characteristic,and the attitude and behavior of integration in urban society may lead to less status discrimination for female migrant workers than male migrant workers.With regard to the urban-rural difference in gender discrimination,the reconstructed gender relations between female and male migrant workers in urban society allow women to gain more net benefits from more equality in the urban-rural migration process.Further,this paper uses "satisfaction" as an example and identity discrimination and gender discrimination as mediating variables to construct a mediating effect model to verify the relationship between the relative differences in social discrimination and the social attitudes of migrant workers.It is found that identity discrimination mediates the relationship between migrant workers’ gender and their satisfaction,and gender discrimination mediates the relationship between female migrant workers’ inter-provincial migration and their satisfaction.This means that,on the one hand,the mediating effect of lower identity discrimination among female migrant workers significantly enhances their satisfaction compared to male migrant workers.On the other hand,the mediating effect of lower gender discrimination in urban society significantly increases their satisfaction compared to rural society.Finally,the above study explains to some extent why female migrant workers have more positive social attitudes than male migrant workers.The gender difference in identity discrimination and the urban-rural difference in gender discrimination are two important reasons for the difference in social attitudes between female and male migrant workers,with female migrant workers being lower than male migrant workers on the identity discrimination dimension and female migrant workers being smaller than male migrant workers in urban areas on the gender discrimination dimension.Female migrant workers have lower social attitudes than male migrant workers on the dimension of identity discrimination,and female migrant workers in urban areas have lower social attitudes than male migrant workers on the dimension of gender discrimination.