“A Bit Unsure about Gender Equality?”: Gender Expectations among Chinese and American Young Adults

• In Event: 50260 - Section on Asia and Asian America Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 3: Gender, Sexuality, and Intimacy in Contemporary East Asian Contexts

Abstract

Gender expectations can vary across societies and change over time. In China, traditional gender expectations, the norm for a long period of time, have been experiencing tremendous change over the past century. This study attempts to measure the gender expectations among current young college men and women in China obtained through convenience samples in both countries. To gain a relative sense of the degree to which the expectations held by the Chinese are traditional versus progressive, they are compared to the same expectations among American college students. Across the seven individual indicators revealing expectations regarding work role, marriage, employed mothers, going childless, earning family income, doing household chores and family financial decision making, large significant gaps appeared between countries. In brief, the Chinese respondents tended to provide responses indicating more hesitancy regarding gender equality or less willingness to fully embrace it. However, the American respondents tended to be off the fence and were more strongly in agreement with statements about gender equality in family and work life. A gender expectations scale was created from the questions about gender equality to explore its determinants. They varied somewhat across countries. Males scored lower on this scale than women and this variable was the strongest predictor. Mother’s work status, mother’s education level and father’s education level all had positive relationships to progressive gender expectations for the Chinese respondents but not the Americans. Religiosity was a significant predictor of expectations for the Americans but not the Chinese. The results largely reflect overall findings from other international comparisons of gender expectations.

Authors

• Timothy Joseph Madigan, Mansfield University of Pennsylvania

• Sampson Lee Blair, University at Buffalo