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?

Gu Xiaorong

Published: 8:30am, 8 Jul 2021

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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

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.

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.

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.

A group of young delegates head for the Great Hall of the People at the opening ceremony of the All-China Women’s Federation Congress in Beijing in 2003. Photo: Mark Ralston

In a recently published study, Professor Wei-Jun Jean Yeung at the National University of Singapore and I explored mechanisms underlying the gender reversal in academic achievement among adolescents in the late reform era.

Data from China Family Panel Studies document a “girls’ premium” in test scores: in 2010, girls led boys in the language test by a large margin, which continued in 2014; in 2010, girls scored higher in the maths test (though not statistically significant), and the gap widened to a significant level in 2014.

Historically, daughters were regarded as short-term members of the patriarchal family; once married off, they were likened to water thrown out. However, rapid economic development, increasing returns on education, and sharply reduced fertility seem to have revised the intergenerational contract between parents and daughters in Chinese families.

Consider Grandma Luo. Born in 1958 as the eldest daughter (among seven siblings) of two grass-roots cadres in a village in Hunan, she dropped out of school at nine years old to care for her younger siblings, becoming the “little housekeeper”. Her two youngest brothers, who were basically raised by her, later received higher education and became state employees.

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Chinese female migrant workers empowered by stage roles in dramas based on their stories

Her story is not unique among her generation. A generation later, girls who grew up during the 1970s and 1980s tended to have received some education, but still needed to compromise for their brothers’ opportunities. Such gender-discriminatory experiences have largely disappeared among the latest generation.

In urban families where the only child is female, these daughters often bear their parents’ hopes of international social mobility and competitiveness. Engineer Shen in Shenzhen, whose daughter has been educated abroad since high school, said: “I always tell my daughter not to define herself as a Chinese, but as a daughter of the world. A successful global citizenship allows you to go wherever you want.”

In remote rural communities, I met high-performing girls whose parents invested heavily in them and had soaring educational expectations for them, a far cry from Grandma Luo’s experience.

An additional winning edge is in girls’ non-cognitive skills. Quantitative evidence indicates that they are more committed to study, spend more time on homework, and are more disciplined and socially active – 13 per cent more girls than boys had student leadership (ganbu) experiences.

In interviews, parents generally adopt gendered framing in describing their adolescents’ learning habits and behaviours: girls are naturally “obedient” and “better-behaved” than boys, hence earning good grades. This is echoed among teachers.

In other words, ideas about gender essentialising characteristics such as self-discipline and obedience are reinforced in daily socialisation due to the benefits they bring to academic performance. Moreover, the gender achievement gap is cumulative – earlier (dis)advantages translate into more pronounced (dis)advantages later.

Decades of economic, social, demographic and family changes in Chinese society have jointly reversed the gender academic achievement gap for the latest generation. Its social implications awaits further exploration: how will these young women who have grown up as educational achievers negotiate stubborn gender barriers in career development and transition into adulthood roles?

In an emerging context that encourages higher fertility to avoid repeating the bleak demographic future seen in other East Asian societies such as Japan and South Korea, will China witness a resurgence in patriarchy and son preference that sets back the achievements of girls?

Gu Xiaorong, a sociologist of childhood and youth with a focus on contemporary China, is a researcher affiliated with National University of Singapore