Abstract
We often assume that lower fertility is linked to greater power and status for women; the link might be explained causally, in both directions: when women have fewer children, they have more space in their lives for education and careers. Or when women spend more time in school or focusing on their careers, they are less likely to have many children. But when we look at societies with low fertility, we do not see that women are necessarily more equal to men than in other societies. Lower fertility regimes just as often become a new phase of a long-standing pattern of gender inequality. This chapter uses China as an example of a society with low fertility (and, here, government-promoted increase in women’s labor force participation) that allows us to see how low fertility can exist without much change in patterns of gender inequality.
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Notes
- 1.
Here, I draw from my extensive fieldwork in the Dalian Economic Zone. I interviewed rural migrant mothers about their family lives. See Riley (2012) for more details and findings.
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Riley, N.E. (2018). Good Mothering in China: Effects of Migration, Low Fertility, and Birth Constraints. In: Poston, Jr., D. (eds) Low Fertility Regimes and Demographic and Societal Change. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64061-7_7
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