China’s working mothers struggle with career setbacks and discrimination, finding ‘balance is a false premise’
- China has done away with its decades-long restrictive child policies, but women are finding limitations still exist via workplace challenges and career impediments
- Only 5 per cent of working mums and 12.7 per cent of working dads say they want more children, according to a report
This is the fourth in a series of stories on China’s job market, looking at its history, the role of migrant workers, inequality and the future for its graduates entering the workforce.
Like women in workplaces the world over, struggling to juggle their careers with motherhood, many of those who choose to have children in China are finding that the decision comes with immense challenges – often considerably more than their male counterparts face.
These overarching hurdles have such an outsized influence on equality in Chinese workplaces that the nation’s three-child policy – introduced in May – is of little consequence to a great number of women who do not consider it a viable option to have multiple children, if any.
But most working parents seem to be less enthusiastic about their new reproductive freedom than the government had hoped they would be.
Some 76.9 per cent of working mums and 65.5 per cent of working dads said they are uninterested in having a second child, let alone a third, according to a report published in March by Zhaopin, one of the top job-recruitment companies in China. Only 5 per cent of working mums and 12.7 per cent of working dads said they were willing to have more children.
The consequences of childbirth also tend to be more pronounced for Chinese women working in the private sector, compared with mothers who have more stable careers in the public sector.