Empowering Discourses, Disempowering Outcomes: How do Women Make Sense of Unequal Divisions of Housework in China?
Junrong ShengABSTRACT
Objective
This research examines how women make sense of the persistent inequality in household responsibilities in China, which has in some cases intensified across cohorts.
Background
Despite women's high employment rates, household divisions remain deeply unequal in China, and surprisingly, men's housework has even decreased over the past decade. Yet little is known about how women interpret this enlarged gender gap in unpaid labor.
Method
This research draws on snowball sampling to collect and analyze in‐depth interviews and survey data from 40 cisgender, married women in Hefei, Anhui Province.
Results
Women often embrace an individualist schema of self‐reliance, rejecting the notion that their extensive domestic work reflects gendered subordination. Instead, they interpret household labor as a sign of their personal or gendered superiority, and construct empowering discourses that reframe gender status differences and revalue women's domestic contributions. While these discourses offer an alternative and reconciled understanding of unequal household divisions, they ultimately revive gender essentialist logics beneath the veneer of modern individualist schemas.
Conclusions
Findings show that women's interpretations function as a culturally situated meaning‐making process through which gender inequality operates in the family. Empowering discourses allow women to reframe inequality as compatible with their empowered sense of self, rendering unequal arrangements livable and durable. Women engage in this interpretive work as adaptive responses to family dynamics marked by men's resistance to domestic duties and by individualist schemas that reinvigorate gender essentialist beliefs in the family.