The terms
As a signatory to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) in 1979, China has developed a series of measures, legal frameworks and programmes to improve the social status of women and promote their equal rights and opportunities.
Confucianism advocated strict gender roles. A woman's duty was to her husband, wifely responsibilities, family duties, and household chores. Young women were expected to remain chaste and pure virgins until marriage and were not meant to remarry, even if their husbands died.
In the hierarchy of traditional Chinese cultural family life, the father and sons take prominence over the mother and daughters. A cliché of classical texts, which is repeated throughout the tradition, is the familiar notion that men govern the outer world, while women govern the home.
The terms Yin and Yang set the ground work for gender roles in China and are still used to this day. Yin or "women" is described as soft, passive and weak. Yang or "man" is viewed as hard, dominating and assertive.
Agriculture can be a key to understand the Chinese son preference history. For thousands of years in China, most of the Chinese preferred sons rather than daughters because majority of males have more ability to earn more than girls, especially in agrarian economies.
For example, girls and women are generally expected to dress in typically feminine ways and be polite, accommodating, and nurturing. Men are generally expected to be strong, aggressive, and bold. Every society, ethnic group, and culture has gender role expectations, but they can be very different from group to group.
Spoken Chinese has only a single third-person pronoun, tā, which is gender-neutral, referring to all genders or none. Since Chinese grammar does not require speakers to mentally keep track of everyone's gender, they often don't.
Gender roles are the roles that men and women are expected to occupy based on their sex. Tradi- tionally, many Western societies have believed that women are more nurturing than men. Therefore, the traditional view of the feminine gender role prescribes that women should behave in ways that are nurturing.
"China is a Communist country where women's emancipation is a fundamental state ideology, so the government has to at least pay lip service to women's gender equality, and in a way, the government has enacted laws and regulations over the years to try to protect women's rights,” the China-born researcher told ...
Potential Impacts of the One-Child Policy on the Child Sex Ratio. The imbalance in the male to female sex ratio in China reached alarming levels within just 20 years after the original execution of the one-child policy. In 2005, the gender balance of male to female at birth surged at 1.20.
The one-child policy was a program in China that limited most Chinese families to one child each. It was implemented nationwide by the Chinese government in 1980, and it ended in 2016. The policy was enacted to address the growth rate of the country's population, which the government viewed as being too rapid.
Gender role ideology falls into three types: traditional, transitional, and egalitarian.
Traditional gender ideologies emphasizes the value of distinctive roles for women and men where men fulfill their family roles through breadwinning activities and women fulfill their roles through homemaker and parenting activities. Gender ideology also refers to societal beliefs that legitimate gender inequality.
The Gender Role Beliefs Scale (GRBS) is a brief, psychometrically sound, unidimensional, self report measure of gender role ideology--defined as prescriptive beliefs about appropriate behavior for men and women.
Sinitic languages (or topolects) are largely gender-neutral. Chinese has no inflections for gender, tense, or case, so comprehension is almost wholly dependent on word order.
Many Chinese names are gender-neutral, but certain names are more commonly given to boys than girls.
The ancient Chinese character for female (女, this is the simplified Chinese character for female) consists of a pictographic representation of a person kneeling with hands folded, a pose seen as a form of submission.
Researchers found that across cultures, individualistic traits were viewed as more masculine; however, collectivist cultures rated masculine traits as collectivist and not individualist (Cuddy et al., 2015). These findings provide support that gender stereotypes may be moderated by cultural values.
Culture provides the context in which gender roles, identity, and stereotypes unfold as well as parameters regarding sexual behavior. Culture affects variation in gender-related behaviors between individuals within a cultural group as well as variation between cultures.
Gender Roles
The term gender role refers to society's concept of how people are expected to look and behave based on societally created norms for masculinity and femininity.
Causes. The causes of the high sex ratio in China result from a combination of strong son preference, the one-child policy, easy access to sex-selective abortion, food scarcity, and discrimination against and abuses of females.
Masculinity denotes the distribution of roles between two genders in a society. Germany and China both score 66 on this dimension, compared with Finland with a score of 26. Competition, achievement and success are valued in masculine societies.
Gender ratio in China
The percentage of the female population is 48.71 percent compared to 51.29 percent male population. China has 37.17 million more males than females. China is only behind India, where males outnumber females by 54 million.
There are many different gender identities, including male, female, transgender, gender neutral, non-binary, agender, pangender, genderqueer, two-spirit, third gender, and all, none or a combination of these.