Being a woman in India vs. China

by liberal japonicus

I've been getting notifications for Noema Magazine (https://www.noemamag.com/) that often has articles on topics that might be in the wheelhouse of folks here. I'm tempted to toss up several of them, but rather than do that, if folks find an article they are interested in, send it in and I'll make it a post.

The magazine has had a slew of interesting articles and several are on China, but rather than post all of those (by different authors), I thought I'd post this one, which has some interesting observations and carves out a relatively clear cut niche.

https://www.noemamag.com/i-would-rather-be-born-a-woman-in-china-than-india/

The question was almost impossible to answer in the abstract without taking the lived realities of different individuals into account. It was just as wrongheaded to conflate a Muslim dissident in Xinjiang with a business tycoon in Guangzhou as it was a Dalit (“untouchable”) night soil worker in the Indo-Gangetic plain with a software engineer in Bangalore. But even as I resisted being forced into a definitive answer, given the multiplicity of unavoidable caveats, I increasingly, and unexpectedly, found myself plumping for China over India when it came to gender. Women in China certainly did not have it easy, but “easy” is relative.

Growing up, my literary imagination had been fattened on a steady diet of narratives of oppressed Chinese women, from O-Lan, the long-suffering protagonist of Pearl S. Buck’s classic “The Good Earth,” to the grandmother of writer Jung Chang, whose feet were bound at the age of two, as detailed in her bestselling family history, “Wild Swans.”

As a result, I was unprepared, imaginatively, for the sheer physicality of women in China that I immediately noticed upon arriving in Beijing in the summer of 2002. Chinese women inhabited public spaces in a way that was impossible in most parts of India. They didn’t walk as though folding themselves inward to be invisible to passing men. They didn’t avoid eye contact. They rang their bicycle bells loudly. Sometimes they loitered. They were often brash, elbowing their way to the front of queues.

There is some interaction here with class. I don't believe that India has never experienced something within its history that has upset the class structure to any great extent. The article also makes this interesting observation:

Arguing the benefits to women of China’s Communist Revolution is certainly open to debate, but what’s even more controversial is this: In the post-Mao era, for more than three decades (1979-2015), China experimented with the world’s largest demographic engineering effort, the one-child policy, under which a large percentage of the country’s population was restricted to having a single child. The impact on China’s sex ratio was devastating. Many families secretly aborted female fetuses; at the time I lived there, around 117 boys were born for every 100 girls — one of the most skewed gender ratios in the world.

But in India, without any equivalent demographic restrictions, that gender ratio was almost as bad: 110 boys for every 100 girls. And there were districts in states like Punjab and Haryana where it spiked to a horrifying 130 boys for every 100 girls.

There was, moreover, another side to the one-child policy coin that benefited female children in China. Preeti Choudhary, a village council representative from Faridabad, in the Indian state of Haryana, was visiting Beijing as part of a youth delegation when she asked me: “If, in Haryana, we also made it compulsory to have only one child, what couldn’t the women achieve?” She argued that being freed from the burden of raising several children was empowering. Moreover, if a family could only have one child, all resources would be made available to feeding and educating that child, regardless of gender.

As synchronicity would have it, I was looking at this paper, which had this observation:

Underlying these “child penalties”, we find clear dynamic impacts on occupation, promotion to manager, sector, and the family friendliness of the firm for women relative to men. Based on a dynamic decomposition framework, we show that the fraction of gender inequality caused by child penalties has increased dramatically over time, from about 40% in 1980 to about 80% in 2013.

I'm still trying to turn this over. While for the individual, I'm sure that the 'child penalty' (which the authors are, in their conclusion, say they are "agnostic about the potential welfare and policy implications of our findings. Although the term “child penalty” may have normative connotations, we do not draw any normative conclusions here.") is 'a penalty', if the analysis is extended to the family unit, what would happen. Anyway, have at it.

Comments

[wj]

Arguing the benefits to women of China’s Communist Revolution is certainly open to debate

I haven't gotten tot he articles themselves yet. That said, I think the benefits of China's Communist Revolution derive far more from the "Revolution" than from the "Communist."

Briefly, for women's position in "traditional societies" (which generally means patriarchal ones) to improve, a big disruption is probably extremely helpful. Exactly what kind of disruption is, I suspect, less critical than that there be something which forces society to change substantially -- on whichever front.

China had one. India, overall, did not. At least, not yet.

[Snarki, child of Loki]

The Iranian revolution being the exception that proves the rule, no doubt.

[CharlesWT]

In National Geographic's The best and worst countries to be a woman, China ranks 76 and India ranks 133.

[CharlesWT]

In CEOWorld Magazine's RANKED: The World’s Best Countries For Women, 2021, China ranks 95 and India ranks 49.

[wj]

China ranks 95 and India ranks 49.

CEOWorld ranks the US 20th in 2021. But we're working hard to increase that. By the time the 2023 numbers come out, I bet we have achieved 30th.

[Pro Bono]

...the fraction of gender inequality caused by child penalties has increased dramatically over time, from about 40% in 1980 to about 80% in 2013.

This is saying is that gender inequality (in Denmark) which is not caused by the 'child penalty' has been greatly reduced, which is a good thing.

I was very aware of this child penalty affecting my wife's career as a doctor. But I don't think her hospital was much to blame: the decisions we made affected how many hours she could spend at work, and other doctors, usually male, who put much less time into childcare, gained a relative advantage.

[aiiguide]

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