“Never a right time, never a right place”: Chinese single working women’s work-life experiences and negotiation of career identity

This research investigates how the status of singlehood and childfree affects Chinese single working women’s work-life experiences and their sense of self related to their career, under the current pro-marriage and pro-natal social culture. The government’s keen desire to boost population sustainability, reflected by emphasising women’s ‘central role in the family’ in 2013 and the abolishment of the One-Child Policy in 2016, renders women’s effort in the workplace less important than their ‘obligation’ to become wives and mothers. Such advocacy of traditional gender division of labour leads to women facing intensifying discrimination and marginalisation in their daily work and the process of job seeking.
Previous studies in gender and employment suggest that women’s fulfilment of gender expectations through role transitions to spouse and motherhood usually leads to further gender-based disadvantage and inequality, such as the motherhood penalty. Nevertheless, whether the social pressure from women’s unfulfilled gender expectations affects their employment and work experiences is a question worth further investigation. In contemporary Chinese society, where single women beyond their mid-20s are usually labelled as ‘leftover women’, with an accusatory meaning that they miss the right time to marry because of educational or career pursuits, the question of gender expectations remains underexplored. Through 64 biographical narrative interviews with Chinese single working women located in mainland China, the United Kingdom, and the United States, this research argues that the career experiences and self-perception at work of single women in China are affected by the intersectional pressure from gender, age, and singlehood. For Chinese single women in the UK and US, their immigrant status interplays with their gender and singlehood, which consists of a new set of intersectional pressures which also affect their work and employment. The theoretical contribution of this research focuses on underestimated and undertheorized difficulties faced by Chinese single women between productive and reproductive roles at work and life interface imposed by traditional gender role expectations derived from Confucianism and neoliberal value orientation brought by marketisation. In this thesis, I principally argue that single working women of reproductive age in China are disadvantaged by the intersectional pressure of their gender, age, and singlehood in the labour market and workplace. Compared with the work and life stories of single women living and working in the UK and the US, I further argue that these employment disadvantages related to women’s single and childfree status at reproductive age are culturally bound to China’s contemporary social context. I propose a notion of “double penalty” to address the unique dilemma single working women face in China’s labour market and workplace, in which their single and childfree status is simultaneously translated into the absence of wifehood and motherhood at present and transition into wifehood and motherhood in soon future, disadvantaging them synchronously.