Gender equality in China: What happens after marriage?

When you think China, the first thing that comes to mind probably isn’t gender equality. And why should it be, when many agricultural families still prefer boys to girls, and even urban families are mainly concerned with marrying their daughter off into a good family.

So maybe I wasn’t the only one (pleasantly) surprised when I learned that half of the world’s female, self-made billionaires are Chinese. It didn’t really make sense to me at first. Having lived in Beijing for many years, I knew what my liberally conservative Chinese parents thought. Okay, so they didn’t encourage me to just marry well and pop babies out, but they sure did seem to expect other women to aim for that common goal. Oh dear, your cousin’s turning 28 this year…I told your father to set her up with someone from the news agency! If she gets any older, all the good ones will be taken already.

If that’s true, then how is this environment a conducive breeding ground for half of the world’s female billionaires? I found the answer when I took a step back and really assessed the career paths of the Chinese women in my life. That’s when it all made sense.

My grandmother grew up in a time when feet binding, a practice that physically crippled women for aesthetic purposes, was still very much the norm. But she also lived in a time when famine was rampant and both parents would have to work in order to feed their children and make ends meet.

The reason why the feminist world subtly (and sometimes, not so subtly) discourages women from prioritizing marriage as a life goal, is because of the common conception that a woman’s personal life ends after marriage. She’s much more likely to raise a family than focus on her career.

It’s not the same in China, simply because many families don’t have that luxury. Whether it’s out of financial necessity or whether it’s residual from the female equality movement in the Mao era, there’s a new current of female empowerment in modern China. Overriding the supposed “confines” of marriage, this surge of powerful women proves that it’s possible to conquer both the home and work place.