Where are the missing girls? Gender inequality, job precarity, and journalism students’ career choices in China

Abstract

This study aims to explain the puzzling discrepancy between the large number of female journalism students and the comparatively fewer female journalists in the workforce in China today. Based on in-depth interviews with 20 graduates in journalism from the same class, we investigate the female students’ professional socialization process and analyze the external and internal factors that led most of them to choose a journalism major but not to join the journalism industry. Along the three significant phases in a funnel-shaped model—admission, college education and internship, and job market—we identify the combined influences of structural gender inequality and female students’ increasing gender awareness and agency. We further examine female students’ situation through the conceptual lens of precarity and discuss how it is manifested in ways that differ from those in the West. Our findings reveal a mixed picture of gender reality in Chinese journalism and in Chinese society.