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ENVIRONMENT

CIVIL SOCIETY

GENDER

Over the last fifty years, China has made enormous progress towards gender equality. It is one of China's basic state policies. But as the Chinese Government’s White Paper on Gender Equality and Women's Development in China outlines, in the process of economic restructuring China is being confronted with new challenges and problems related to gender issues. The social and economic status and the needs of Chinese women are becoming increasingly diversified.

HBF China cooperates with Chinese research institutions in the field of gender and the economy, aiming to learn more about these challenges and finding solutions to address them.

Women and unpaid labour

China’s transition from a planned to a market economy has brought dramatic changes in the economy. These changes have had far-reaching implications for gender inequality in both paid and unpaid work.

However, our knowledge of the processes and outcomes associated with non-market activities, e.g. care for children and eldersly, domestic labour, and unpaid work in household production, has remained limited.

Because the unpaid care sector is largely ignored in standard economic education and research, the building of research capacity is of critical importance not only for fostering a deeper understanding of this understudied subject but also for promoting gender mainstreaming in economic education.
This project will cover four topics:

1. Patterns of childcare and women’s labour force participation;
2. Access to formal childcare and children’s early development of working women;
3. Urban labor market reforms, demographic transition, and women as caregivers as well as care-recipients;
4. The impact of care for children and elderlys on women in low-income rural areas.

The Chinese Women Economic Research and Training Program at China Center for Economic Research of Peking University is the leading institute for this project. The main research methods include literature reviews and statistical analyses. Interviews with enterprise managers, female workers, elderly, heads of children and elderly care facilities, and officials in charge of childhood early development and welfare of the aged population will provide further background information.

The results will be published in four articles and a summary report. Furthermore, a number of international conferences are planned in 2008. A joint seminar will be organized from this project and the project on “Women and informal employment” for exchanging research results on these two relevant issues.

Women and Informal employment

The rapid processes of economic liberalisation and growth have transformed China over three decades from a closed, centrally planned economy to one that is remarkably open, and globally integrated.

This project focuses on the way in which the economic restructuring is changing the nature of employment for women – notably by creating greater flexibility and informality of work for many in the labour force; and by extension, reducing the benefits and social protections available to many workers. The implications of these processes for women’s labour force participation, like earnings, time use and access to social protection yet have not been the subject of systematic research.

This project is executed by the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, in close cooperation with a number of relevant Chinese institutions. The main research activities include:

1. Using existing data sets to undertake quantitative analyses of informal employment and its impact on women;
2. Undertake some qualitative and case study research to illuminate the results found in the quantitative studies;
3. Propose ways to improve data collection, survey instruments and develop a program of further research;
4. Work with young scholars to develop conceptual and methodological capacities to work on issues of gender particularly in economic analysis.

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