Butterfly Effect
behind
Family Planning
The Butterfly Effect
The butterfly effect is a metaphor for the subtle changes brought about by a random event. This moment can also explain that the development results have slight modifications to the final conditions, and the subtle changes in requirements are likely to cause significant differences in the results.
In China, in addition to its direct radiation influences, a policy may also affect other factors. In certain circumstances, certain factors are inextricably linked and affect people's lives. The one-child policy affected Chinese society in subtle ways just as butterflies flapped their wings.
Boy's Preference
Through a close look at the data, we can come to an inference that is not surprising: under the family planning policy, there are still stubborn birth selections in this society, and its choice is boys.
The "one-and-a-half child" policy even purchases pass for boys in rural areas. In the "birth until boys" culture, boys have become the mainstream rather than just a preference. The policy was initially employed to gain broad significance, but it did not expect that it would pay for a particular selection and social culture.
The butterfly effect, from this beginning, began quietly from the birth ring.
One and a half, two-child policy
In terms of specific policies, the implementation of the family planning policy in mainland China has been substantial before 2013. It intends to continue implementing the one-child policy, with one and a half children and two single children as supplements. In the autonomous regions and some ethnic minorities (Zhuang, Manchu) ), there is a policy that allows two or more children to be born under several circumstances
However, with the advent of population ageing, the country began to encourage childbirth and increase the birth rate. Since 2013, the two-child policy has been promoted, which allows with only one child can have two children, but the Little effect, the birth population did not meet national expectations in 2015;
So in 2015, the country began to implement a comprehensive two-child policy. The government stipulates that each family can only have two children at most, and the government only fund the first two children. The seventh national census in May 2021 showed that after the two-child policy was promulgated, the proportion of the second child increased significantly. On May 31, 2021, the three-child policy and supporting support measures were released.
The Anxiety of the Eldest Daughter
Those girls in the 'one-and-a-half-child policy' in rural areas live in the gap between policy and culture. The role of the eldest daughter puts them under considerable pressure.
On the one hand, the eldest daughter is required to be a leading role model in the family. On the other hand, the younger brother has brought the whole family's expectations for boys since his birth.
These strict self-requirements and the anxiety caused by gender discrimination spelling issues should be centered on the growth of the eldest daughters. The mind of pursuing higher education and migrating to the big cities to seek more relaxed living spaces was implanted in their hearts.
At present, China has basically eliminated gender inequality in primary education.
According to the White Paper on Gender Equality and Women's Development in China issued by the State Council in 2019, girls' equal access to pre-school education is effectively guaranteed, and more girls can get pre-school education at the right age, and girls account for 46.9% of the total pre-school education; At the stage of compulsory schooling, schoolgirls accounted for 46.5% of the school's students, and gender equality was basically achieved at the stage of mandatory education.
The Story of Huaping Girls' High School
In some poor or remote areas, some forces have been fighting for gender equality in primary education.
President Zhang Guimei established the first national public women's high school Zhonghuaping Girls' High School. Since the establishment of the school in 2008, it has helped more than 1,800 girls get out of the mountains and enter the university.
"I was born as a mountain instead of a stream. I want to look down on mediocre ravines from the top of the peaks. I am born as a man, not a grass, and I stand on the shoulders of great men and despise humble cowards."
Such an oath inspires many girls born in low-income families motivated many girls to refuse to admit defeat and their fate and go out of the mountains to the broader world.
The fundamental realization of primary education has laid a foundation for women to seek higher education to some extent. It is precisely because of these gradually bridged results that women, especially rural women, have enough ability to hold it when they encounter upward opportunities.
The college entrance examination is an opportunity for rural women to walk out of the mountains, to walk out of the mountains to a wider world, and a chance for them to get rid of their original environment. And because of this opportunity, the connection in the chaotic world has become a little different.
The inextricable connection surrounds the butterfly's flapping wings, causing the air currents to flow in a certain direction. This direction guides the girls to run to places outside the gender gap.
Women Leading Higher Education
The 'Program for the Development of Chinese Women 2011-2020' shows that China has not only basically eliminated gender inequality in the compulsory education stage, but the proportion of women in the higher education stage has gradually increased:
In 2019, the proportion of female graduate students in the total number of postgraduates in the school was 50.6%, which has surpassed that of men. We can see that when girls receive sufficient basic education guarantees, they can go further in higher education.
Among them, many rural girls have passed the college entrance examination and went to big cities. "Countryside's exam expert" steps out of the countryside through education, stepping out of the past that boy is preferred, and dreams of winning a place in the new city on their own effort.
Economy is dominant
Although 'knowledge changes destiny' is well known and accepted by the public, education is often tied to the economy. In rural families, family income has become an essential factor influencing whether girls can get an adequate education.
Studies have shown that the economic situation of rural families has a 'narrowing-expanding-narrowing' effect on the internal gender gap in education:
That is, in the case of a low economic level, when the family cannot afford the education expenses of any child, and this will not cause too much impact on gender differences;
When the economic level rises to a certain level, the family can support the education expenses of a limited number of children. At this time, the gender differences become prominent. Girls face hidden or explicit disadvantages in rural societies where the concept of 'patriarchy over women 'is strong. The vary caused by gender occurs here, and women are likely to be forced to give way to male education;
In the stage when the family's economic level is improving again, the cost of education no longer affects the decision of whether to go to school, and the gender gap is gradually narrowing again.
So after receiving higher education, rural women did not return to their original environment. Where did they go?
The data found that big cities' employment opportunities, social resources, and culture are extremely attractive to high-level people. Taking Shenzhen as an example, as one of the Chinese first-tier megacities, data from 2016 to 2019 show that the population of men who migrate from household registration in Shenzhen is smaller than the population of women, and women have become the main force of Shenzhen's migrant population.
The Stickiness of Big Cities
When men and women face the same attractive conditions in big cities, big cities are more sticky to women, or in other words, women have a stronger subjective will to stay in big cities: they receive education in big cities and then seek in big cities occupation, and finally choose to stay in the big city.
Women's Workplace Dilemma
Although the gender gap in education is gradually shrinking and women have obtained many educational opportunities, the structural inequality in a patriarchal society does not end there. In the workplace, they are still subjected to social discrimination.
Overall, according to data from the Peterson Institute, the gender gap rate in China's labour participation rate has risen from 9.4% in 1990 to 14.1% in 2020. This number shows that discrimination in the workplace has always existed, and it has become more severe as women enter the labour market in large numbers.
In the workplace recruitment process, according to a study by the national human rights organization Human Rights Watch, in the 2018 national civil service recruitment directory, nearly one-fifth of the positions are biased towards men.
The National Women's Federation found in a 2015 study that more than 80% of female college students said that they had encountered different forms of gender discrimination during their graduation and job hunting.
Two effects
In the workplace, women generally face the "floor effect" and "ceiling effect".
"Floor effect" refers to women's slow salary increase and little room for promotion, as if they are stuck on the floor; "ceiling effect" refers to women's difficulty in getting a promotion, because there is an invisible ceiling, so even if they rise The upper limit cannot be exceeded.
"Low salary, low position, slow increase, difficult promotion" describes the reality of women in the workplace.
The gender difference in salary in China varies with the regional distribution.
According to the salary data published on the Internet from 2014 to 2015, on the whole, the average salary of women in China is only 60% to 70% of that of men.
Women earn higher incomes in the southern coastal, southwestern border, and northwest inland regions, while women earn lower than men in the central plains.
Insurmountable income gap
In addition, there are two insurmountable gaps in the income gap between men and women:
Generally speaking, people think that with improving women's education level, the income gap with men should be gradually narrowing.
However, this is not the case. Research has found that due to the widespread gender discrimination in the workplace, women's academic qualifications are not proportional to their returns. They often need to earn one more degree than men to get the same salary level.
According to the theory of human capital, the accumulation of working years can increase the return on labour participation. In the research, it is found that the salary level of both sexes is indeed increasing with the accumulation of work experience, but the corresponding gender gap in salary is also widening.
The data shows that the salary of men and women increases with the accumulation of working years, but it is also gradually becoming saturated. From the linear fitting slope values of 0.64 and 0.43 for men and women, it can be seen that the growth rate of men's salaries is higher than that of women.
In other words, while accumulating work experience, women still cannot get the same salary increase as men.
The cost of fertility
The "cost of childbirth" is used to measure the pay difference between women before and after childbirth. Studies have shown that 6% to 7% of childbirth costs mainly come from differences in female productivity and employers' discrimination.
As we know, it takes a lot of time and energy for mothers to take care of their children, which will affect their productivity in the workplace, and thus affect the decline in wages. At the same time, the stereotype from employers and the whole society on working mothers will also prevent them from being. It is believed that they have the same productivity as unmarried women, which in turn affects their salary levels.
In real life, many employers discourage women from having children for the next 3 to 5 years in the recruitment process. This shows that employers' discrimination against working mothers has laid the groundwork from the beginning of the workplace.
Although the entire labour market is hostile to women, with the improvement of economic, political, and cultural conditions, women's job-hunting environment will get better and better. This also encourages women to go to big cities to find better jobs after obtaining higher education. An open and transparent workplace environment helps to realize self-worth.
Heavy Housework Burden
In the labour model in rural areas, in many places, both spouses still follow the division of labour of "men dominate the outside and women dominate the inside". As a woman living in a rural area, she is likely to have to undertake most of the unpaid work in the family.
Data show that rural women participate in unpaid work in the family (including housework, accompanying and caring for children, tutoring children to study, and accompanying and caring for adult family members) for an average of 211 minutes in a day, compared with 69 minutes for men.
The opening of the labour market to women and increasing women's labour remuneration also attract them. If they have economic income, they will achieve more economic independence. Therefore, even some young women who have not received higher education will choose to work in cities, leave their original living environment and move to big cities.
Men outnumber women
Due to the high sex ratio at birth for decades, there are more males than females in newborn babies. Twenty years later, when these newborns enter the marriageable age, there is a phenomenon of more men and fewer women in the marriageable age group. However, men have a wider range of age choices in marriage and childbearing than women, that is, men can choose women younger than themselves to enter marriage, so the reality of more men and fewer women does not seriously affect men to a situation where they have no choice of marriage. Many social factors have become the "real barriers" for men to enter marriage.
"Marriage Squeeze" and Economic Factors
"Marriage squeeze" is used to describe the imbalance in the number of married men and women in a region. Statistics show that in 2015, unmarried men in rural China accounted for 62% of the total number of men, almost twice the proportion of unmarried women who accounted for 38%.
In poverty-stricken areas with a high rate of single men, 65% of men believe that economic difficulties are the main reason why they cannot get married. Poverty prevents local men from bearing the high cost of marriage and also makes local women more inclined to marry out of town.
At the same time, the high cost of marriage also makes it difficult for rural men to get married. In rural China, the high cost of marriage, such as the "two mountains" in the garage, the sky-high price of gifts, hardware and jewelry, and changeover fees, have become "blockers" on the road to getting married.
Studies have shown that in areas with a high rate of single men in my country, the cost of marriage for men is about five times that of local women, while in areas with a low rate of single men, the cost of marriage for men is still three times that of women. Take Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region as an example. In 2015, the amount of the cost of marriage (107,100) that rural male households need to bear is not only higher than the dowry (44,500) that female families need to bear but also much higher than the rural disposable income (0.8700) that year.
The poorer and less educated the rural areas are, the more important they are to similar customs and etiquette, which is undoubtedly worse for the poor men in the area.
The escape of women
The exodus of young women from rural areas has also become the reason why there are more men and fewer women in these areas. Dissatisfied with the current situation, women are bound by the idea of valuing sons over women, so they are actively migrating to larger cities througheducation, marriage, and employment.
Data shows that more than half of women in these areas choose to migrate out for work; at the same time, women leave the original poverty-stricken areas through marriage. The study found that 65% of rural women in areas with a high rate of single men tend to migrate abroad. Even in areas where the rate of single men is low, 44.4% of women still tend to marry out;
Because of the tilt of family resources and the protection of the society's patriarchal ideology, men slacken themselves at the age when they should have been studying hard, or return to their hometowns like "hotbeds" after completing higher education. The gap between the sexes of men and women has been gradually widened after repeated choices.
The data linked to it is that more than 70% of male households in rural areas where the head of the household is males aged 25 to 44 years old, it can be inferred that most of the males in these areas did not remarry after divorce and became one-person households.
It is found that there has been a large number of single fathers in many rural and county areas in recent years. Just as we presumed, the impact of gender on society is like being immersed in magma under a dormant volcano, as if one day Will gush out.Qipaozu (The man whose wife chose to divorce after having the child and did not ask anything else but property.)
Certain rural areas or counties in the Central Plains are accustomed to cultural influences with the concept of "the golden mean". The patriarchal performance in the local area is "a certain degree of patriarchy but not extreme patriarchal patriarchy." When it comes to educational opportunities, it is possible to be trapped in the local area from the very beginning, without extreme preference for sons, women can get certain educational opportunities but still be despised.
Therefore, under the pressure of patriarchy, more and more women choose to leave the county and settle in big cities after receiving education. Local unmarried men have fewer women to choose from, and they have gradually begun to include married women in their marriage goals. The "unhappy marriage", Ye Bianzhou, has taken advantage of the rivers of the times to take advantage of the current situation, resulting in more and more "wife runners". Single father families also appeared.
As if the gift of destiny had already been priced in secret, the family planning policy helped the country slow down the rate of population growth, and at the same time allowed men to taste the gender dividend under it, but the resulting gender imbalance caused The whole society was once again in the whirlpool of gender crisis decades later.
The Whirlpool of Gender Crisis
Relevant studies have shown that the dual pressure of marriage squeeze and the desire to marry on single men will bring more instability to society.
The current situation of more men than women due to marriage squeezing has stimulated single men’s desire to get married from the side, and the current situation of gender imbalance and the reality of economic poverty cannot satisfy their growing desires, thus forming contradictory tensions from within. The tension reflected in the society is the instability brought to health, public safety and so on.
Some researchers have predicted that with a sex ratio of 1.08, the sex trafficking rate and HIV infection rate caused by gender imbalance will reach 8.4% and 0.097% of the total population in 2050, respectively. Not only that, these pressures are likely to contribute to the growth of crime and anti-social behavior.
The place where the butterfly flies has gradually built a web interwoven with ideas, thoughts, and culture, covering every individual in society, whether male or female, under it.
And through the staggered grid, we can still see that there is a wider space:
That is the place where people are willing to take a step back and re-examine themselves and each other in the face of structural gender inequality, admit their weaknesses and deficiencies, and support each other to go on.