ABSTRACT
Economic transformation in post-reform China—involving market reforms, structural change, and internal migration—has been a gendered process resulting in increased gender inequalities in unpaid and paid work. While gender interacts with other social identities, such as ethnicity and sexuality, to contribute to the specific disadvantages experienced by different groups of women, due to space constraints, this chapter focuses on the intersection of gender and residential status (hukou) in China which results in the particularly inferior paid and unpaid work outcomes of millions of women migrants and women remaining in rural areas. Economic transformation has increased economic opportunities and led to improvements in well-being for both women and men. State pensions in which benefits are defined exclusively by a person’s average earnings and length of employment serve to transform gender inequality in the labor market into even greater gender gaps in pension incomes.
