Do Mothers in Rural China Practice Gender Equality in Educational Aspirations for Their Children?

Abstract

More than 2 decades of economic reforms have brought great improvements in the quality of life for women and girls in China. Despite these improvements, in some areas, cultural values and norms concerning gender roles and traditional family structures still influence the values attached to sons and daughters and create strong incentives for son preference (Croll 2000; Li and Lavely 2003). The most striking evidence of the priority parents place on sons is demographic: the "missing girls" phenomenon of abnormally masculine sex ratios at birth. This phenomenon has become more extreme in the economic reform period (Banister 2004). Comments Copyright The University of Chicago Press. Reprinted from Comparative Education Review, Volume 51, Issue 2, May 2007, pages 131-157. Publisher URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/512023 This journal article is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/gansu_papers/2 Electronically published March 14, 2007 Comparative Education Review, vol. 51, no. 2. 2007 by the Comparative and International Education Society. All rights reserved. 0010-4086/2007/5102-0004$05.00 Comparative Education Review 131 Do Mothers in Rural China Practice Gender Equality in Educational Aspirations for Their Children? YUPING ZHANG, GRACE KAO, AND EMILY HANNUM More than 2 decades of economic reforms have brought great improvements in the quality of life for women and girls in China. Despite these improvements, in some areas, cultural values and norms concerning gender roles and traditional family structures still influence the values attached to sons and daughters and create strong incentives for son preference (Croll 2000; Li and Lavely 2003). The most striking evidence of the priority parents place on sons is demographic: the “missing girls” phenomenon of abnormally masculine sex ratios at birth. This phenomenon has become more extreme in the economic reform period (Banister 2004). However, whether parents privilege sons over daughters in making educational investments is a different question. Educational differences between girls and boys have become much more subtle in recent years (Hannum 2005; Connelly and Zheng 2007a, 2007b). This trend raises questions about whether traditional attitudes can still be linked to a disadvantage for girls in education. In this article, we focus on a poor rural area in northwestern China and investigate whether the gender attitudes of mothers can be linked to their plans for educating their own children in the future. Using recent longitudinal data from the Gansu Survey of Children and Families (GSCF), a survey of rural 9–12-year-old children, families, and schools in Gansu province, we explore whether mothers’ attitudes toward gender equality and oldage support, their expectations of future returns from children, mothers’ perceptions of a child’s promise for continuing schooling, and the child’s actual school performance are linked with mothers’ educational aspirations for the child, controlling for family characteristics. Our article proceeds as follows. We begin by reviewing earlier research on educational aspirations and on gender and education in developing countries. We next discuss the cultural and social contexts of rural China and of Gansu in particular. We then provide an overview of our data and proceed with the analyses. We first show descriptive tabulations of mothers’ beliefs and attitudes regarding gender equality and mothers’ anticipated future fiData collection for the Gansu Survey of Children and Families was supported by grants from the Spencer Foundation Small and Major Grants Programs (wave 1), by NIH grants 1R01TW005930-01 and 5R01TW005930-02 (wave 2), and by a grant from the World Bank (wave 2). Analysis was supported by the University of Pennsylvania Research Foundation.