Return of the stay-at-home spouse
Teetering under the double burden of caring for a family while holding down a full-time job, Shanghai’s women are beginning to contemplate what might be called a return to “traditional family values” — a bread-winning husband and stay-at-home wife.
A report on Shanghai women during the 40 years of reform and opening-up was released on Tuesday by Shanghai Women’s Federation and Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences.
According to the report, their status has significantly increased over the past 40 years.
The average Shanghai women spends 10.5 years at school, equal those in developed countries. The number of female postgraduates in universities has grown from less than 20 percent in 1986 to 50.3 percent in 2017.
But in the workplace, women are still a long way behind men, especially since the family planning policy was loosened. Women only occupy about 30 percent of senior positions.
The more education women receive, the more they hope to achieve at work, but in the male-dominated world, women have to work much harder to get ahead.
At the same time, in most cases, women still do the majority of the housework.
“Women spend nearly 3 hours on housework every day, which is nearly 2.4 times more than men,” said Liu Wenrong of SASS.
The academy found that more than 60 percent of women were responsible for caring for the children and about a quarter of them said it was their job to take care of elderly relatives. As a result, many are choosing to return to home full-time.
The number of working women peaked at 71.6 percent in 1982 and has fallen ever since, with only 54.2 of women working in 2010.
Gender equality advocates have strongly opposed the traditional idea that women should care for the family and men should pay for it but we are now witnessing a resurgence of this old idea, the report showed.
The number of women who strongly disagreed with the idea was 45.2 percent in 1990, but that number had dramatically dropped to only 15.5 percent in 2010.
Only about 2.6 percent of women totally agreed with the traditional model back in 1990, but by 2010 the number had increased to 7.2 percent.
Liu blames government policy.
“It’s a social problem. The lack of baby care centers has forced many mothers with young children to give up their jobs,” she said.
Yang Xiong, also of SASS, said the situation also resulted in reluctance to have a second child.
“I’ve talked to many couples. In most cases, husbands said they would welcome a second child while wives didn’t want another one at all,” he said.
Yang said many women could find no way out. They couldn’t leave work because of their high cost of living but at the same time they didn’t have enough time to manage their family affairs. “Sometimes they just don’t have choice,” he said.
Pan Yanming, mother of twin girls aged 4, agrees with Yang. “My husband’s salary is just not enough, and he often travels for business, leaving the bulk of housework to me,” she said.
Yang pointed out that young women are getting married or having children later.
Between 2005 and 2015, the number of unmarried women aged between 25 and 29, widely believed to be the age most suitable to get married, increased 11.9 percent. In 2015, they tied the knot for the first time at an average age of 28.4, which is 5.4 years later than 2005. In the US, the average first marriage age for women is 27.
But what really matters is the postponement of child-bearing. In 2015, the average age for a first birth was 29, exceeding that of some developed countries such as US (26.3), UK (28.6) and Canada (28.5). In Japan and South Korea, the numbers are 30.6 and 31 respectively.
The report also showed women’s health had significantly improved. The average life expectancy of women has increased from 74.8 in 1978 to 85.9 years in 2017, the highest on the Chinese mainland.