Opinion | How girls in patriarchal China rose to outperform the boys in school
Rapid economic development, rising returns on education and sharply reduced fertility have reversed the gender academic achievement gap for the latest generation
But how will these girls negotiate stubborn gender barriers in career later, and will a return of an emphasis on the birth rate erode these gains?
This year, the release of results for China’s National Higher Education Entrance Examination, or gaokao, usually a season of fame and celebration for top students, seems rather quiet, especially after the education ministry warned against hype. But a video interview of a “study goddess” who scored 692 points out of a possible 750 has gone viral.
In it, she said she would like to study computer engineering at university and become a programmer. When told it was a male-dominated field, she dismissed the concern, retorting that no boy in her school did better than her in the gaokao.
This reminds me of a seminar I attended in Shenzhen in 2014 when I was a PhD researcher. One parent made reference to yin sheng yang shuai – where yin, which symbolises the female, is rising against a retreating yang, which symbolises the male – in referring to the better performance of girls in primary and secondary schools, and it led to heated discussions.
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Student cries tears of joy after getting high score in China’s university entrance exam
Student cries tears of joy after getting high score in China’s university entrance exam
For quite a few of the male teachers and fathers there, the idea of yin sheng yang shuai was unsettling. Yet, females overtaking males in educational achievement is increasingly a global phenomenon.
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Since the 1990s, this has been the case in more than 100 countries, spreading from advanced industrial societies to developing nations. According to sociologists Thomas DiPrete and Claudia Buchmann, by 2010, US census data showed women had an 8-percentage-point lead over their male counterparts in receiving their university degree.
In a society that once had one of “the most patriarchal family systems that ever existed”, in anthropologist Susan Greenhalgh’s words, how girls rise up to become the higher-achieving gender is a story worth unpacking. After all, for much of China’s dynastic history, women’s intellectual achievement was discouraged, given the popular wisdom that “ignorance is a female virtue”. Even after the Maoist era, which popularised the revolutionary slogan “Women hold up half of the sky”, about half of females aged 15 and above remained illiterate in 1982, according to the World Bank.
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Numerous studies based on data collected in the early phase of the reform period similarly revealed that women lagged behind in educational achievement.
For example, Zhou Xueguang and his associates found a consistent educational disadvantage for women in urban China between 1949 and 1994. In particular, during 1978–1994, the odds of females entering senior high school were 0.22 lower and entering college 0.34 lower than those of males in comparable groups.
