ABSTRACT

The prevailing assumption about gender differentials in migration is that men play more central roles than women in population movements. The widely held notions that men are more mobile than women, that men travel longer distances than women, and that men move primarily for economic reasons and women for social reasons explain researchers’ greater attention on the mobility of men than on that of women (e.g. Gu and Jian 1994: 24; Liu 1990; Wang and Hu 1996: 91-92; Xu and Ye 1992; Yang 1991). Some of these notions are popular in Western literature and can be traced back to E.G. Ravenstein’s (1885: 197) observation that “females are more migratory than males within the kingdom of their birth, but . . . males more frequently venture beyond.” In China, these notions are reinforced by the persistence of sociocultural traditions that downplay women’s roles in society (e.g. Li, Shuzhuo 1993; Yang 1994: 201; Yu and Day 1994; Zhang 1995; see Chapter 1). Thus, women’s mobility has remained peripheral to the mainstream scholarly and policy discourses on internal migration in China.