Now Reading: Chinese media shift women’s portrayal to family roles: study
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Chinese media shift women’s portrayal to family roles: study
A study of 125,000 People's Daily articles from 1990 to 2023 finds that China's official media has increasingly tied women to domestic and family roles while downplaying their public careers. The gap…
The Story in Brief
A study of 125,000 People's Daily articles from 1990 to 2023 finds that China's official media has increasingly tied women to domestic and family roles while downplaying their public careers. The gap between private-sphere references (family, childbearing) and public-sphere ones (career, entrepreneurship) widened sharply from the late 1990s, peaking in 2018. The researchers, Jia Wang and Ruiyu Zhang, published their findings in Frontiers in Sociology in May. No woman has served on the seven-member Politburo Standing Committee, and since 2022 none of the 24 Politburo members have been women. Only one of 31 provincial party heads is a woman.
The Indian Opinion
China's official narrative of gender equality has long been a selling point, but this study exposes a chasm between rhetoric and reality. The state media's pivot to domestic roles conveniently aligns with the party's push for more births. Yet a modest rebound from 2020 suggests demographic panic may force a course correction. The real test: will the three-child policy lead to a genuine return of women to the public sphere, or merely deepen the expectation that they serve the state as mothers first?
Sources (2): hindustantimes.com, timesofindia.indiatimes.com
This story was synthesised by AI from the 2 sources linked above.
Updated: this story now draws on 2 sources.
