The Gender Ideology–Practice Gap: How Family and Market Institutions Reproduce Gendered Labor in Chinese Weddings

• In Event: Sociology of Sex and Gender Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 6. Care, Intimate Labor, and Social Reproduction

Abstract

Research on the household division of labor consistently finds that egalitarian gender ideology is associated with more equal labor allocation. Yet persistent gaps between egalitarian beliefs and everyday practices suggest that ideology alone cannot account for the reproduction of inequality. This study shifts attention to the broader relational and market contexts in which couples are embedded – specifically intergenerational ties and marketized service systems – and examines how these contexts structure the ideology–practice gap. Using wedding planning in China as a strategic case – a labor-intensive, time-bound process that crystallizes ideals about gender and family when couples, parents, and commercial actors converge – the analysis draws on three months of ethnography in two wedding companies and 34 in-depth interviews with brides, grooms, and parents. Findings reveal a generational pattern. When parents take the lead, weddings reflect more patriarchal ideology, yet planning labor is relatively evenly distributed through parental involvement and standardized wedding services. When couples take the lead, weddings are framed in egalitarian terms, but labor becomes unevenly allocated, as customization requires intensive coordination disproportionately undertaken by women. Marketized wedding services reinforce this dynamic, as both standardized and customized services are organized around gender-essentialist assumptions. Standardized services reproduce patriarchal scripts by default, while customized services allow couples to negotiate egalitarian ideals – but only at the cost of significant effort and labor. I conceptualize this dynamic as an institutional paradox of egalitarianism: even as couples embrace gender equality, the intersection of intergenerational authority and market logics reorganizes responsibility in ways that reproduce inequality.

Author

• Yulin Yang, Brown University