The Impact Of Trade Opening On Female Employment In China

Fostering a new demographic dividend by promoting gender equality and female employment will play an important role in China’s economic growth.However,for China to realize the goal of employment equity,there is still a long way to go.The second-child policy has reduced the willingness of employers to hire female employees and aggravated the gender discrimination in the job market.Therefore,the employment of women has received more attention.Numerous studies have shown that trade opening will bring new employment opportunities to Chinese women through upgrading industrial structure,improving educational equity and changing the division of labor in the family.Nowadays,international trade has always had a decisive impact on China’s economy and people’s livelihood,and also affects the employment situation of women in China.Therefore,this paper will study this issue.This paper reviews the existing studies on the role trade liberalization plays in impacting women’s employment.Firstly,this paper reviews the causes of gender employment inequality,and then the literature is summarized from two perspectives:the impact of trade opening on women’s employment participation and the quality of women’s employment.In addition,this paper sorted out two possible mediating effect of trade opening’s influence on women’s employment participation,which provided a basis for the empirical test.In this paper,the data of CHIPs were matched with the data of Statistical Yearbook of Chinese Cities to obtain the data at the individual level,and DID method was used to test the impact of trade opening on the employment participation of Chinese women from the micro level of individuals and families.The regression results show that the employment participation of women in cities that are more affected by international trade has increased,and women can get more new job opportunities than men,so gender inequality in the labor market has been alleviated because of the economic opening.The regression results has passed the conditional test of DID method and the robustness test of substitution variables.On this basis,this paper conducts a mechanism test to examine whether trade openness affects women’s employment participation through technological progress and educational returns.The regression results show that both the above two mediating effects exist.This paper also further tests the impact of trade opening on women’s employment quality.Job stability and career level is selected to examine employment quality.The results show that while women have more opportunities to take up highly skilled jobs in cities that are more affected by international trade,more women also end up in temporary jobs in these cities.Moreover,the quality of employment for women has not improved relative to that for men.