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Gender in Families: A Comparison of the Gendered Division of Child Care in Rural and Urban China

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Abstract

Background

Understanding the regional differences in child care is critical as the gendered division of child care in the family remains unequal between husbands and wives in China.

Objective

The study aims to assess how child care time is divided differently between husband and wife within the families in urban and rural sectors, and how these divisions are associated with factors such as one’s own or spouse’s employment status, educational achievement, and earnings.

Method

We analyzed data from the China Health and Nutrition Survey (2004, 2006, 2009, and 2011), using the relative resources theory, “doing gender” perceptive, as well as the gender attitudes model to explain gender differentials in child care among urban and rural families.

Results

The gender difference in child care continues to persist but with a variation between urban and rural sectors. In addition to the wife’s own employment status, the husband’s employment status as well as income has played important roles in influencing the child care division inside the household.

Conclusions

The relative resources theory explains the pattern of the gendered division of child care in rural sectors but cannot account for the patterns in urban sectors. Instead, patterns in urban women’s child care time were more consistent with a “doing gender” perspective and urban men’s child care time were consistent with an egalitarian gender attitudes model.

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Notes

  1. In order to capture the real gender gap in incomes, the log-income was not used here, but it was used in the regression model.

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Acknowledgements

This research uses data from China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS). I thank the National Institute for Nutrition and Health, China Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Carolina Population Center (P2C HD050924, T32 HD007168), the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the NIH (R01-HD30880, DK056350, R24 HD050924, and R01-HD38700) and the NIH Fogarty International Center (D43 TW009077, D43 TW007709) for financial support for the CHNS data collection and analysis files from 1989 to 2015 and future surveys, and the China-Japan Friendship Hospital, Ministry of Health for support for CHNS 2009, Chinese National Human Genome Center at Shanghai since 2009, and Beijing Municipal Center for Disease Prevention and Control since 2011. No direct support was received from Grants as aforementioned for this analysis. This research was conducted at the University at Buffalo, the State University of New York as part of the author’s doctoral dissertation.

Funding

This research was support in part by the Social Science Foundation of Beijing, China (Grant No. 19SRC013) and the education and teaching reform fund in Central University of Finance and Economics (2018GRYBJG07).

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  1. School of Sociology and Psychology, Central University of Finance and Economics, 39 South College Road, Haidian District, Beijing, China

    Sibo Zhao

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Correspondence to Sibo Zhao.

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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. This article does not contain any studies with animals performed by the author.

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Zhao, S. Gender in Families: A Comparison of the Gendered Division of Child Care in Rural and Urban China. Child Youth Care Forum 49, 511–531 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10566-019-09541-5

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