ABSTRACT
Commercial life insurance as an industry is emerging in China at the intersection of the country’s transformation from a socialist to a market economy and the global expansion of the insurance industry to developing countries. Interestingly, quite a large number of women in their early thirties quit their former jobs to join the insurance sales force for reasons similar to those cited by Xu. The emergence of large numbers of laid-off workers further shaped the gender composition of the insurance sales forces. Citing a survey from 1996, Thomas Rawski reports that 59.2 percent of the laid-off workers at the national level were women, and the proportion of women in the laid-off pool in Shanghai was as high as 68.9 percent. Viviana Zelizer suggests that the utilitarian association of money with death results in a negative evaluation of life-insurance companies and their agents.
