Who does the housework in China?

  • August 24, 2015
Who does the housework in China?

Study shows Chinese boys less likely to help with housework in urban settings.

Chinese mothers’ progress to gender egalitarianism - through participation in professional work - comes at the cost of their daughters' sinking deeper into domesticity as daughters act as the “natural substitute” for their professional mothers at home.

Yang Hu

The sons of Chinese parents who share housework more equally are more likely to help around the house in traditional rural areas, according to a study by a Gates Cambridge Alumnus.

Yang Hu's study of the reproduction of gender inequality in China shows that sons are more likely to learn to do housework from their parents when there is a larger contrast between their parents' behaviour and the society around them whereas daughters only push for greater sharing of housework between the genders in more progressive, urban environments where it is more the norm.

The study, which was published in The Journal of Marriage and Family, an internationally leading journal in social sciences and family studies, also found that when parents are not able to outsource housework, for instance, to a cleaner, daughters of working mums are seen as the "natural substitute" for the housewife role. Yang says: "Chinese mothers’ progress to gender egalitarianism – through participation in professional work – comes at the cost of their daughters' sinking deeper into domesticity as daughters act as the “natural substitute” for their professional mothers at home."

Yang says that, although researchers have shown that attitudes towards housework are often linked to parental behaviour and social context respectively, there are few studies examining how parental behavior and context interact to influence children. He used data from the China Family Panel Studies 2010 to look at the difference in behaviour modelling between girls and boys aged between 10 and 15 from two-parent families in rural and urban China.

The study is based on Yang's PhD in Sociology at the University of Cambridge [2011]. He is currently a Senior Researcher in the Department of Sociology at the University of Essex.

Picture credit: W.carter (Own work) CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Latest News

Inclusive conservation

Rohini Chaturvedi finished her PhD at a difficult time for many students – in the midst of the global economic crisis of the early 2010s. But through a combination of hard work, initiative and serendipity she has found an impressive way to extend the work she did at Cambridge to promote conservation efforts in India. […]

Research impact award for Gates Cambridge Scholar

A Gates Cambridge Scholar is one of two winners of the 2023 Sandra Dawson Research Impact Award for his work on the economics of climate change earlier this month. The annual award was established through a generous donation from Professor Dame Sandra Dawson, a former Director of Cambridge’s Judge Business School. Winners are chosen based […]

AI system self-organises to resemble brains of complex organisms

A team of Cambridge scientists, co-led by a Gates Cambridge Scholar, have shown that placing physical constraints on an artificially-intelligent system – in much the same way that the human brain has to develop and operate within physical and biological constraints – allows it to develop features of the brains of complex organisms in order […]

Scholar wins history of science & medicine essay prize

A Gates Cambridge Scholar has won a prestigious essay competition about the history of early science with a treatise on evidence of knowledge exchange between the Ming-Chinese and Iberian conventions in the 16th century. The essay competition was run by the Early Sciences Forum of the History of Science Society and the Early Science and Medicine journal […]