It is undoubtedly the case that declining marriage and fertility rates have become a global phenomenon. Unfortunately, women are usually the first to be blamed for instigating this demographic problem that has been seen as the culprit for a series of social and economic crises, such as population ageing, future labour force shortages and increasing social costs of welfare and healthcare systems. The most common argument, based on Gary Becker’s classic theory of marriage, is that women’s growing economic empowerment, brought about by greater access to paid jobs and tertiary education, results in their delaying or even forgoing marriage and childbearing.
The presence of (heterosexual) single women has long been portrayed with ambivalence in most contemporary popular cultures. Such attitudes are predominately based on a collection of stereotyped cultural assumptions derived from postfeminist rhetoric and neoliberal heteronormative standards, rather than from everyday realities or taking into account the complexities of women’s lives. On the one hand, women’s singlehood and childlessness are conventionally seen as signs of being closer to the image of an ‘ideal worker’ set by masculine standards in workplaces and labour markets. To some extent, this presupposed advantage renders women’s work experiences as non-mothers or in a pre-motherhood period invisible when talking about gender inequality at work. On the other hand, living outside a traditional nuclear family template or quasi-married heterosexual relationship invites attention and social pressure, and is even stigmatised. The deeply ingrained social attitudes that marriage and having children are essential to women’s happiness and fulfilment, link long-term singlehood to a problematic femininity. Consequentially, a sexualised gaze puts a spotlight on single women’s romantic life stories, while the other dimensions of their life and social relations are widely overlooked. The most classic example is the iconic image of an urban bachelorette – Carrie Bradshaw from HBO’s globally famous TV series Sex and the City. Although she and her three female friends were depicted as ‘single career women’ ‘living in their own apartments, supporting themselves, and not requiring marriage to keep them financially or sexually afloat’, their stories of how to achieve this step by step, as single working women in their own professions, were omitted. Career was shorthanded as a symbolic element to complete the postfeminist discourses that women enjoy full autonomy of their life by actively making choices about consumption and men.
The problem is that, as subjects who undertake both labour activities and the ‘obligations’ of producing the next generation of labourers, to what extent can women’s free choice between work and family be guaranteed in reality? My current doctoral research looks at Chinese single working women’s work and life experiences, and how singlehood affects their career trajectories and professional identities. The problem is located against the backdrop of intensifying social pressure in Chinese society on young women to get married and have children as soon as possible, to reduce the government’s anxiety about social stability and and population sustainability. Back in 2007, the derogatory label ‘leftover women’ was first used by the state media and then became prevalent in daily communication, the press and government propaganda, as a response to increasing numbers of unmarried young people, particularly women. This label condemns those unmarried, well-educated and financially independent women beyond their mid-20s for investing too much time in their education and career rather than in finding Mr Right. In the following years, the government developed proactive pro-marriage and pro-natalist policies and propaganda, aiming to boost fertility rates and to re-establish traditional family values as part of long-term tactics to strengthen ‘cultural confidence’. The measures include the promotion of a three-child policy in 2016, and the revision of the Marriage Law in 2020 which added more thresholds to divorce. A recent proposal suggested shortening the overall duration of education and lowering the legal age of marriage to make women ‘marriageable’ earlier.
Despite these aggressive measures, the tide of dwindling marriage and fertility rates seems to have become unstoppable. In 2022, the total number of marriage registrations hit its lowest point since 1986, declining from 13.5 million couples in 2013 to 6.83 million per year over the past decade. Birth rates also dropped to a record low of 1.09 per woman in 2022. Additionally, the number of unmarried adults was reported to reach 220 million in 2021. It is fair to say that more and more women (and men) in China are turning away from marriage and children regardless of the state’s promotion of parenthood.
But could the fact that more women stay away from family and caring responsibilities be translated into more advantages for women in the labour market? A contradictory picture emerges if we link this to other statistics: the percentage of women within the total number of higher-education students has increased from 24.1 per cent in 1978 to 52.04 per cent in 2022, which means that more women obtained higher qualifications than men did. However, women’s labour force participation continuously fell to its lowest point of 61.6 per cent in 2022 from 70.8 per cent in 2000. This suggests, counterintuitively, that more women with good qualifications and without a family ‘burden’ seem to be losing, not winning, jobs in China’s labour market.
Preliminary findings from my research may help to explain this paradox: one set of results suggest that in China, single women are subject to a unique discrimination based on ‘maybe baby’ assumptions in recruitment and promotion processes. ‘Maybe baby’ is a concept which recently appeared in the academic literature, referring to employers’ expectations that a child-free female applicant or employee at ‘childbearing age’ will be more likely to have a child in the foreseeable future or be distracted by plans for maternity because of personal fertility demands or social norms. This presumption of future motherhood, regardless of each woman’s actual plans, takes women’s non-mother status as an index of risk for future human resource costs (e.g. employee turnover and maternity pay). As a result, employers and managers take ‘precautions’ to avoid these ‘risks’ by asking detailed questions about women’s maternity plans, offering shorter-term contracts, or even quietly rejecting such candidates. A 29-year-old female accountant revealed her experience. Although she would have liked to change to a different agency or find a better-paid position in a financial investment company, she did not dare to because
“…[It was so] difficult to find new opportunities. I tried to contact some HRs and head-hunters but always got questions like ‘so when are you going to get married?’, ‘when are you going to have a kid?’… I found they are questions you can never answer correctly – if you said you didn’t want marriage and children at all, nobody would believe it and sometimes they might think you have a problem. But if you actually gave them something like a plan, they would feel you are going to get pregnant on the second day of getting the position and become a ‘maternity leave theft’…I think I will stay in my current agency, [I have] no choice.”
But the story from an employer’s side provides a different perspective. A female executive of an online education start-up expressed her mixed feelings about these discriminatory ‘precautions’:
“Sometimes you really don’t have a choice. That’s something I didn’t realize before I attempted to start my own business…For example if we hired five new teachers for a new class and three or four of them are single or newly married women around 28 or 29, it is inevitable for us (as management) to think about whether marriage or having children would be an important stage goal in their plans for the next couple of years, whether things are going to change (after they get married and have children), how our performance will be affected if we are understaffed and not have enough cash flow to get temporary employees…I’m a woman and I really hate gender discrimination, but creating a fair environment takes money and it is hard for a business struggling to survive to achieve this alone (without help from the government).”
My research therefore shows that, when the state’s desire to increase female labour intersects with employers’ desire to make women more cost-effective, the price is borne by women themselves. If previous stories of a motherhood penalty revealed that women are punished because of maternity, then stories of single working women in China demonstrate that disadvantage can occur due to the mere potential for potential. Between these narratives, what is the future of work for women?
Ne Ma is a PhD student at University of Leeds.
Image credit GRANT ROONEY PREMIUM via Alamy