Through the narrowing path: changing social norms and becoming 'leftover' women in contemporary China

This talk investigates how China’s rapid social changes in the past three decades have created the problematics of 'leftover' women and how these single, educated women experience conflicting gender expectations at different life stages over time. To turn 'culture and demography' from 'reluctant bedfellows to committed partners,' we innovatively bring together two qualitative data sets collected independently – semi-structured interviews with 30 such women in Shanghai, and content analyses regarding changes in gender norms from 202 mainstream magazine articles. We conduct data analyses in an integrative way, comparing changes of gender norm through time at the macro level with the experiences of these post-80s women dealing with contradictory gender expectations when growing up and when facing the challenge of family formation. Speaker Biography Yingchun Ji is the Eastern Scholar Professor in the School of Sociology and Political Science at the Shanghai University. As a family sociologist and social demographer, Dr Ji obtained her PhD in the sociology department at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Her interests include family sociology, social demography, gender, health studies, quantitative and mixed methods. She has published in journals of multiple disciplines, including sociology, family studies, population studies, and health studies. Much of her research is dedicated to family and gender issues in the Asian institutional and cultural context. Through empirical studies, she further seeks to conceptualise and theorise family and gender dynamics in transitional society such as China. During 2014 and 2015, Dr Ji edited a special issue regarding family changes in East Asia with Journal of Marriage and Family. She is currently leading three projects, 1) investigating gender inequality in China in both the public and private spheres; 2) evaluating the potential impacts of the newly announced two-child family policy on gender inequality in China; 3) investigating the so-called 'leftover' women issue in the context of changing gender inequality in China. Dr Ji is also preparing for a project examining the mismatched marriage market between 'leftover' women and 'surplus men' in China.