ABSTRACT
China has undergone rapid economic and social changes since the beginning of the reform period in 1978. The growth of the private sector is one significant change that has been the subject of considerable study. Women’s participation in this expanding sector, however, has received relatively little attention (Gates 1991: Kitching 2001). In the complex environment of China’s burgeoning private sector, women are renegotiating gender stereotypes and constructing their own space. These educated, urban professional women are also playing an important part in shaping business networking practices by discovering and developing the tools with which they can most successfully negotiate relationships in the workplace. This study, based on a survey of women in Beijing and Shanghai, examines how women are responding to the pressures to conform to female stereotypes in their professional and domestic lives and how they express agency through their interpretation of and resistance to mass-media models of femininity.
