Education and Gender Egalitarianism: The Case of China

Education and Gender Egalitarianism: The Case of China

Xiaoling Shu University of California, Davis

This study examined Chinese attitudes toward women's careers, marriage rights, sexual free-

dom, and the importance of having sons using a 1991 national sample of individuals and com-

munity-level data and through a series of nested multilevel models. Education influences gender attitudes in multiple ways at both the micro- and macrolevels. Better-educated individuals

hold more egalitarian gender attitudes, and this positive effect of individual education is larger for women than for men, indicating a strong empowerment effect for women. Egalitarian

gender attitudes trickle down through education, as individuals in communities with high edu-

cation are socialized toward more egalitarian attitudes. Community education has a larger effect toward the egalitarian direction on the attitude toward the importance of having sons

than on the attitude toward women's marriage rights, indicating that change in the latter atti-

tude occurred earlier and has now spread via education. These findings show that education

is a vehicle of socialization that is used by both the domestic power elite (the Communist

Party) and the Western culture.

This article examines the effect of education on gender attitudes in China by reviewing spatial variations in egalitari-

an gender attitudes among the Chinese population and analyzing education as an important mechanism of influence. There has been little systematic study of gender attitudes in China, and the few existing studies have been based on personal impressions and interviews with individuals from small nonrepresentative samples (Honig and Hershatter 1988; Wolf 1985). Studies that have been based on national samples have generally focused on gender inequalities in education, the labor market, and the division of household labor (Entwisle and Henderson 2000; Entwisle et al. 1995; Hannum and Xie 1994; Matthews and Nee 2000; Parish and Busse 2000; Parish and Farrer 2000; Shu and Bian 2002, 2003; Zhou, Moen, and Tuma 1998). Little is known about the ideologies that buttress the Chinese system of gender social stratification.

China is an important and interesting case for evaluating the relationship between education and gender egalitarianism. First, few societies in history have prescribed a lower status for women than traditional Confucian China. In all stages of life, women were subordinate to men-obeying fathers when young, husbands when married, and adult sons when widowed. Most women had no access to schooling and lacked economic roles outside the home. Once married, women were not allowed to divorce or remarry (Stacey 1983; Tao and Min 1994; Wolf 1985). Elite ideals encouraged suicide as an honorable response to a violation of chastity. Female foot binding was widely practiced. This pattern of male domination extended well into the first half of the 20th century, and some of these patriarchal beliefs and practices continued into the 1980s (Honig and Hershatter 1988; Stacey 1983; Wolf 1985).

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Second, despite extensive knowledge about the determinants of gender attitudes at the microlevel in advanced industrialized societies (Fan and Marini 2000; Mason, Czajka, and Arber 1976; Mason and Lu 1988; Thornton, Alwin, and Camburn 1983; Thornton and Freedman 1979), little is known about the development of gender attitudes in a fast- developing country like China or about the mechanisms by which micro- and macrolevel social forces influence these attitudes.

In this article, I address these gaps in knowledge by analyzing educational influences on egalitarian gender attitudes in China at both the micro- and macrolevels, identifying societal influences that produce change in gender attitudes at the macrolevel via their effects on individual attitudes at the microlevel. I start by reviewing major theories and empirical work on the relationships among education, women's status, and gender norms and then examine historical evidence of these relationships in the Chinese context. From theories and historical accounts, I derive education as the most important harbinger of change toward egalitarian gender attitudes. Finally, by estimating a series of multilevel models, I assess the influences of education-individual education, community education, and the gender gap in community education-on gender attitudes, analyzing a sample of 18,066 individuals from 44 Chinese counties and cities.

With only cross-sectional data and no appropriate historical-longitudinal data, my analysis will not permit inferences about the temporal causal process by which egalitarian gender attitudes have diffused in China. Instead, I com- bine historical evidence with cross-sectional data to examine mechanisms of the determination of Chinese egalitarian gender attitudes. It is not my purpose to convert "spatial heterogeneity into homogeneous development" (Thornton 2001); rather, I believe that spatial heterogeneity is interesting in its own right.

EDUCATION AND GENDER ATTITUDES

Theories of social convergence and modernization suggest that shifts toward egalitarian

gender attitudes are part of a modernization process that encompasses a systematic change in basic values (Bell 1973; Inglehart 1990, 1997; Inglehart and Norris 2003; Inkeles and Smith 1974), but extensive evidence indicates that economic development per se has no direct influence on change in gender norms. First, at certain stages of economic development, societal gender attitudes may move in an egalitarian direction, while at other stages, they may move in the opposite direction.1 Second, economic development often improves the position of some women but causes a decline for others, and this polarizing effect is more likely to occur with increasing economic inequality (Boserup 1980, 1990). Third, the impact of development on women also depends on various factors, such as age and education. Young and educated women are more likely to benefit from industrial employment, while the status of older and poorly educated women may diminish in both work and family situations. Finally, as part of a long-standing value system, some traditional gender norms are likely to persist.2

Sociological research on attitudes has argued that education is the most likely harbinger of changes in values (Bowles and Gintis 1976; Dreeben 1968; Durkheim 1923/1961; Stember 1961). In traditional societies, family or kin informally educate suc- ceeding generations, providing economic skills and introducing appropriate social conduct and values. Following industrialization, the formal educational system expands to bestow knowledge and skills that prepare individuals for specific occupational tasks. Moreover, the formal educational system transmits a body of culture that is valued by the elite of that society (Brint 1998). Education thus plays an increasingly significant role in socializing individuals to values and orientations that the elite deems appropriate for that society (jackman and Muha 1984).

Analyses of both historical and cross-sectional data have demonstrated that education is associated with gender attitudes in two ways. First, higher levels of education have given rise to social and cultural change with regard to women's roles in industrialized soci-

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eties (Inglehart and Norris 2003). For example, women's increased education in the United States led to a resurgence of the women's movement in the late 1960s and 1970s, which, in turn, changed women's aspirations and preparations for occupations, which then led to institutional changes in women's status in society and within the family (Fan and Marini 2000; Shu and Marini 1998). Second, better-educated individuals have more egalitarian gender attitudes. It has been found that education-particularly college education for women-has the strongest effect on gender attitudes, resulting in college-educated women having the most egalitarian attitudes (Mason et al. 1976; Spitze and Huber 1980; Thornton et al. 1983; Thornton and Freedman 1979).

However, past research has shown that the use of individual education in predicting attitudes has its limitations. First, although individual education shows the strongest association with attitudes among measures of individual characteristics, it usually explains only a small amount of variance in attitudes (Fan and Marini 2000; Jackman and Muha 1984; Mason et al. 1976; Mason and Lu 1988; Thornton and Freedman 1979). Second, education influences some types of attitudes more than others, since it is clearly related to items that measure attitudes toward individual rights but not to items that measure attitudes toward equal rights for subordinate groups (Jackman and Muha 1984). Third, individual education fails to explain why the transition in some gender attitudes took place at an earlier time than it did in others. As early as the late 1940s and 1950s in the United States, change was already taking place with respect to views on gender equality of oppor- tunity in the labor market (Spitze and Huber 1980). However, it was not until the 1960s and 1970s that change occurred in views on the division of labor within the home (Mason and Bumpass 1975; Mason et al 1976; Spitze and Huber 1980; Thornton and Freedman 1979). Last, although individuals with the most education-the educated elite-have played a substantial role in shaping the population's value orientation, so have the most powerful and most affluent segments of a society. For example, the state has played a

central role in consolidating and reinforcing gender equality in many societies (Judd 2002; Yuval-Davis and Anthias 1989). Roles played by education in determining values deserve careful specification.

I argue that individuals should be viewed as forming their gender attitudes through constant interaction with the social environment whereby individual- and community- level education is indicative of the nature of this person-environment interface. Thus, in analyzing the process of value development, we sociologists should shift our exclusive focus on individual education to emphasize the multiple elements of value determination: sources of socialization, the time line of value transition in different attitudes, and the empowerment and socialization effects of education. To do so, we need to treat gender attitudes as a multidimensional construct, analyze the effects of both community and individual education, and compare differences in these educational effects at the micro- and macro levels, by gender, and by the dimensions of gender attitudes.

First, the source of socialization in gender attitudes is the dominant culture, which could emerge out of the prevailing political ideology, economic and political dominance, and/or elite values. For the Chinese population, there are two sources of influence on gender attitudes: a domestic official culture promoted by the Chinese Communist Party and, in more recent years, the Western culture. As a result of these multiple influences that emphasize different aspects of gender equality, I see gender attitude as a multidimensional construct. The patterns of value transition on these multiple dimensions are expected to vary.

Second, the content of socialization via education varies according to the values promoted by the elite within a society's population during a specific historical period. At times, this variation is manifested in the differential timing of value transitions. Change in gender attitudes tends to be uneven, with progress on some dimensions of gender attitudes taking place at an earlier time than progress on others, reflecting the order in which different dimensions of gender attitudes are advanced by the elite. Because

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these influences permeate the Chinese population through the socialization effect of education, differences in the effect of community education on multiple dimensions of gender attitudes thus reflect the order in which the elite initiates changes. Smaller variation in one dimension of gender attitudes by community education indicates that the transition on this dimension started at an earlier time and that an egalitarian attitude on this dimension is widely diffused and more widely accepted.

Third, education influences gender attitudes through its dual effects-socialization and empowerment. Education transmits the values of a society's political culture, which are partly derived from the values of the elite segment of the population.3 Given access to this elite culture, the better educated are able to escape traditional beliefs. Students learn new attitudes via didactic and social learning processes, such as modeling and reinforce- ment. Thus, changed attitudes do not neces- sarily emerge from an individual's personality or cognitive development, but from teachers, textbooks, and other school experiences. In other words, individuals learn attitudes in school in the same way that they learn physics, chemistry, or history (Bowles and Gintis 1976). The better educated lead the rest of the population in changing attitudes because they are widely exposed to the elite culture and have a greater sensitivity to "fashionable" ideas (Jackman and Muha 1984). This influence of socialization filters through the Chinese population through community- level education because individuals in highly educated communities tend to have a greater awareness of the influences of the dominant culture through either direct educational experience or indirect exposure via others in the community.

At the same time, education influences gender attitudes by improving individuals', especially women's, material prospects. More education provides individuals with better occupational opportunities and income in both rural and urban China (Entwisle et al. 1995; Shu and Bian 2003; Walder 2002; Zhou, Tuma, and Moen 1997), and this beneficial effect has also been found to be larger for women than for men-for each additional

year of education, the increase in earnings is larger for women than for men (Bian, Logan, and Shu 2000; Shu and Bian 2003). Education thus empowers individuals, particularly women, opening up new employment and earnings opportunities, expanding individual frames of reference, and changing the way they view themselves in relation to the outside world. The effect of individual education on gender attitudes reflects such an influence.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

In this section, I first review historical changes in education and other institutions that result- ed in a change in women's status in Chinese society and in the family. I then discuss historical change in gender ideologies in China.

Education and Women's Status in China

The early 20th century saw the creation of greater educational opportunities for both sexes in urban China. The cultural influence of the West raised awareness of the social status of Chinese women, particularly among well-educated women. With the end of the exclusively male system of imperial examina- tions and the adoption of new models of schooling from the West and Japan (Cleverley 1991), urban women's school enrollment started to increase and the gender gap in years of schooling began to narrow. The illiteracy rate for women who were born between 1910 and 1930 declined from 70 percent to 50 percent (Lavely et al. 1990). For those who started school in 1918, the average number of years of schooling was 1 for women and 7 for men; this number jumped to 7 years and 9.5 years, respectively, for those who started school in 1949 (Whyte and Parish 1984). The May Fourth movement spread modern ideas, such as family reform and women's rights, which became popular with urban students, intellectuals, and young women workers (Johnson 1983). Educational institutions established by both Westerners and Chinese introduced concepts like political freedom, individualism, self-reliance, and the Western treatment of women (Levy 1963).

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On the other hand, data from Chinese censuses indicate that more than 95 percent of rural women who were born between 1910 and 1930 were illiterate (Lavely et al. 1990). The bulk of rural women's work con- sisted of housework and child rearing (Davin 1975); women participated only minimally in remunerative farmwork and subsidiary production,4 and then only during the busy sea- sons (Buck 1937; Davin 1975). Women were also handicapped by continuous pregnancies (Buck 1937) and had limited economic power.

When the Communists came to power in 1949, China's educational system expanded rapidly. Between 1949 and 1976, the number of elementary schools tripled, and the number of middle schools increased by more than 36 fold; enrollment levels tripled in elementary schools and increased 45 fold in middle schools. Colleges almost doubled, and the number of college students grew by a factor of greater than 6 between 1949 and 1965, the year before the Cultural Revolution, which completely dismantled the system of higher education in China (Research Institute 1991).5 The number of middle schools and their students grew the fastest in rural China (China Education Yearbook 1984). In urban China, the female illiteracy rate dropped from nearly 20 percent for those born in the 1930s to less than 5 percent for those born in the 1960s, and more than 92 percent of the women in this younger cohort obtained some secondary education (Lavely et al 1990; Research Institute 1991).

To augment its political power, the Communist Party consistently nursed the development of the women's movement. The Party strongly promoted women's labor- force participation and equal marriage rights, believing that women's limitations in these areas were sources of gender inequality (Wolf 1985). In 1950-a year after the Communist Party officially came to power-the Trade Union Law mandated equal pay for equal work and provided paid maternity leave and the right to nurse babies at work (Cleverley 1991). In the same year, the Marriage Law declared that husbands and wives enjoy equal status and have the same rights to property after divorce (Cleverley 1991).

The Communist Party valued schools as an important tool for indoctrinating young people to communist ideology and ethics. In 1950, the Department of Education instructed middle schools and universities to promote a "revolutionary attitude toward life" among students and to devalue old feudal ideas and values. Both regular classes and extracurricular activities included political education (China Education Yearbook 1984). In 1979, the Department of Education further instructed schools at various levels to foster great revolutionary expectations in young people (China Education Yearbook 1984). The educational system served as an apparatus for mobilizing women into the labor force. Urban women's labor-force participation rates remained high even during their reproductive years (Whyte and Parish 1984).

In rural China, fundamental transforma- tions in social and economic structures also changed women's status, but the change was more modest. The expansion of the educational system reached rural China much later and at a slower pace than in the cities. The female illiteracy rate among those born in the 1960s remained as high as 20 percent, even though it declined from more than 90 percent for the older cohorts (Lavely et al. 1990). Data from the 1982 Third Census show that the overall illiteracy rate for rural China in 1982 remained as high as 35 percent, with the rates for those born in the 1950s ranging from 25 percent to 29 percent and for those born in the 1960s ranging from 11 percent to 1 7 percent (Research Institute 1991).

The transition to a market economy, initiated in the late 1970s, has brought profound changes to the Chinese population. Since 1976, the growth in China's education was concentrated at the college level, with the number of colleges more than doubling and the enrollment of students more than tripling by the end of the 1980s (Research Institute 1991). The open-door policy that was endorsed by the new leadership in the early 1980s initiated a wave of extensive cultural exchange with foreign institutions of higher learning, including short- and long-term teaching assignments to foreign faculties, mutual visits, exchange of students, research and teaching collaborations, and donations

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of library collections from foreign universities (Research Institute 1991). Mastery of one or two foreign languages was required to fulfill college educational requirements. Reading, audio, and video materials in foreign languages, English in particular, became popular among college students. The Western influence in the 1980s started to make inroads into Chinese universities. In particular, Western ideas of sexual fulfillment and sexual liberalism gained popularity among the educated elite, and a more relaxed attitude toward pre- and extramarital sexuality began to diffuse among the Chinese population (Farrer 2002; Parish and Farrer 2000).

During the same period, the Chinese government's focus on women's issues shifted to family planning policy as a measure of population control. The 1985 Law of Succession gave women equal rights in the disposal of property, and more-liberal divorce regulations enabled women to initiate the termination of unhappy marriages (Cleverley 1991). Although there is evidence that the highly educated segment of the Chinese population already had some exposure to Western culture, the Communist Party has remained the most powerful apparatus of control in China. Schools at all levels are under its direct and indirect monitoring and control. The Communist Party started to recruit members among college students and graduates in the 1980s (Bian, Shu, and Logan 2001).

Change in Gender Norms

Before 1949, Chinese women had markedly inferior status to that of men. Axioms, such as "men plough, women weave" and "men rule outside, women rule inside," guided the sexual division of labor. Women were expected and encouraged to guard their chastity, sacri- ficing their lives if necessary. Women could not remarry, while men were expected to remarry to fulfill their obligations. A popular saying stated, "Sons are cherished and daughters are slighted" (Stacey 1983; Wolf 1985).

Substantial changes occurred in these gender norms after 1949. Personal interviews and impressions indicated that women's employment outside the home became widely

accepted in urban China. Urban residents also generally endorsed women's rights to divorce, remarriage, and sexual freedom within marriage. Asked whether "a widow is allowed to remarry," 44 percent to 60 percent of the respondents in an urban sample said yes (Wolf 1985). Other findings showed that urban husbands tended to participate somewhat more than their rural counterparts in domestic chores and that divorce tended to be far more egalitarian in custody and property settlements in urban than in rural areas (Whyte and Parish 1984). Urbanites also showed a decline in preference for sons (Andors 1983; Honig and Hershatter 1988); according to interviews, because daughters now had financial obligations to their parents both before and after marriage, mothers no longer considered sons as important as they once had. Parents could now live with either sons or daughters, generally with pension support from their work units (Wolf 1985). An ethnographic study of young people in Shanghai, one of the most highly educated and Westernized cities in China, found an increasingly relaxed attitude toward sexual activities among young people, both male and female (Farrer 2002), signifying changing attitudes toward women's sexuality.

Although rural China had also moved toward egalitarianism in women's marriage rights and sexual freedom, the change had been more modest. Asked whether widows or divorcees should remarry, most rural people thought that they should remarry only if they had young children and no in-laws to support them. If a widow's or divorcee's sons were nearly old enough to support her, 64 percent to 83 percent thought that she should not remarry (Wolf 1985). The preference for sons remained strong in rural China, since income depended heavily on the number of farm laborers, elderly parents depended on their sons' support, and daughters lived with their husbands' families when they married.

HYPOTHESES OF THE STUDY

Education is expected to influence gender attitudes at two levels: at the individual level, through educational attainment, and at the

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community level, through the average education and gender gap in years of schooling in the city or county in which the respondent resides. Models in which only individual-level variables are included have been found to account for a modest level of variance (.035-.105) in gender attitudes (Mason et al. 1976; Thornton et al. 1983; Thornton and Freedman 1979). The process of attitude determination should be analyzed at both the individual- and community levels, in that research based on multilevel data has demonstrated that contextual influences exert an important impact on individual behaviors in such areas as childbearing, health, and crime (for a review, see Axinn and Yabiku 2001; Sampson, Morenoff, and Gannon- Rowley 2002).

Micro- and Macrolevel Educational Effects

Individual Education There is extensive evidence that educated women are more likely than uneducated women to have liberal gender attitudes in the United States (Fan and Marini 2000; Mason et al. 1976; Mason and Lu 1988; Thornton and Freedman 1979). Education influences gender attitudes by improving individuals' material prospects. More education provides individuals with better occupational opportunities and income in both rural and urban China (Entwisle et al. 1995; Shu and Bian 2003; Walder 2002; Zhou et al. 1997). By improving individuals' material outlook, education empowers them. I hypothesized that the higher an individual's education, the more egalitarian the individual's gender attitudes.

Research has found that the beneficial effect of education on individual material prospects is larger for women than for men in China. For each additional year of education, the amount of return in earnings is larger for women than for men (Bian et al. 2000; Shu and Bian 2003). I also hypothesized that the positive effect of individual education on egalitarian gender attitudes is larger for women than for men.

Community Education China's ruling elite, the Communist Party, has long recognized the socializing effects of schools and has used schools to promote gender equality, socializ-

ing young people to new values and attitudes toward women. It instructed schools to "make an effort to strengthen revolutionary order and discipline, bring up a new genera- tion with socialist consciousness and help to revolutionize the moral tone of our society" (Deng 1984:121). This form of instruction relies not only on teachers as agents of socialization, but on student leaders and school- based peer groups, such as the Young Pioneers and the Communist Youth Leagues (CYL),6 whose membership is "irrespective of sex" (Price 1975). As part of its agenda to promote gender equality, the Communist Party instructed schools to provide a setting for girls and boys to internalize the principle of gender equality by confronting both sexes with similar tasks and giving them similar treatment in both academic and extracurricular activities. Unlike their experience within the household, where they are often excluded from certain activities, girls in schools find that they are expected to participate in activities side by side with boys.

In addition, this socialization influence of education can exert a contextual influence on attitudes through psychological processes operating within individuals' social networks. Social context consists of the effects of social interaction, the pattern of social relationships that constrains interaction, and the content of transactions among interacting individuals (Erbring and Young 1979). When interacting with others in their networks, people tend to receive information that is biased in the direction of their associates' beliefs and are reward- ed for adopting similar beliefs (Sprague 1982). Social contexts differ substantially between high- and low-education communities. Because education is positively associated with egalitarian gender attitudes, those who live in high-education communities are more likely to encounter ideas about gender equality and thus are more likely to adopt similar attitudes through socialization, including the processes of social learning, social acceptance, and differential association (House 1987; Seeman 1981; Weil 1985). I hypothesized that gender attitudes are more egalitarian in communities with higher average education.7

The content of socialization varies according to the values promoted by the elite with-


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in a society's population. At times, this varia-' tion manifests as differential timing in transitions in views on gender equality of opportu- nity in the labor market and on gender equality in the division of labor within the home (Mason et al. 1976; Spitze and Huber 1980; Thornton and Freedman 1979). Similarly, changes in gender attitudes varied in their timing in China; gender equality in the labor force and marriage spread throughout society via community-level education. In the 1950s, schools encouraged students to read newspa- per stories about modern women and provided field trips to movies and operas that depicted young women escaping arranged marriage and participating in the "socialist revolution." It was not until the 1980s that the Party tackled the traditional preference for having boys and passed the Succession Law, which gives women rights in the disposal of property, to further its family planning policy. Schools taught students that girls are as good as boys and that women can fulfill familial obligations as well as can young men. From the 1980s, China had also been becoming more open, and Western ideas about equality in sexual relationships were starting to make their way into Chinese urban elite society (Farrer 2002; Parish and Farrer 2000; Rofel 1999).

Universities, in particular, exposed young people to Western notions of romance and sexual fulfillment through either original Western literature and films or translations or direct contact with faculty and students from Western countries. Highly educated women and men were more accepting of sexual sat- isfaction for both husbands and wives (Liu 1992). The changing attitudes toward women's sexual freedom and the importance of having sons have been initiated more recently, so differentiation in these attitudes by community-level education is expected to be larger. Because of these historical processes, egalitarian attitudes toward gender equality in the workplace and women's marriage rights are more broadly diffused and more generally accepted, and there is less variabili- ty in these attitudes. I thus hypothesized that the effect of community-level education is greater on attitudes toward women's sexual freedom and the importance of having sons

than on attitudes toward women's career and marriage rights.

Gender Gap in Community Education Measured as the difference between men's and women's average education, a community's gender gap in education can influence the gender attitudes of its residents, particularly those of women. When the educational disparity between women and men is large, there are fewer female role models for younger women to emulate. Women in such communities are also less likely to come into close contact with highly educated women who could influence them through processes of socialization. Women thus perceive few opportunities for themselves in both education and the labor market. Because of their limited opportunities outside the home, women in these communities have little bar- gaining power within the household and thus perceive few rights for themselves within the family. I hypothesized that the larger the gender gap in education in a community, the more traditional women's gender attitudes are.

Cross-level Interactions Between Individual and Community Education It is likely that individual-level differentiation by microlevel education is weaker in highly educated communities. In other words, individual-level differentiation in gender attitudes is likely to be smaller in communities with high average education because egalitarian gender attitudes are more widely spread. I hypothesized that the positive effect of individual education on gender attitudes is smaller in communities with high average education.

Women with higher levels of individual education tend to have greater resources and internal strengths to sustain their egalitarian gender attitudes when they encounter a negative social environment, such as large gender inequality in education. Because individual education opens up new opportunities for employment and earnings, expands individuals' frames of reference, and changes the way in which individuals view themselves in relation to the outside world, highly educated women are expected either to have strong resistance to or to be relatively insulated from negative community-level pressure on gender

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attitudes. I thus hypothesized that the negative effect of gender disparity in education in a community on gender attitudes is smaller for women with higher levels of individual education.

Control Variables

In evaluating these hypotheses, the analyses also controlled for the effects of macrolevel variables-community economic development and rural/urban community-and microlevel measures-birth cohort, Communist Party membership, work status, earnings, parenthood, ethnicity, and religion. I analyzed the male and female samples separately to control for the gender effect. I briefly review the rationale for including these variables in the analysis in the Appendix.

DATA AND MEASURES

I used data sets at two levels in this analysis. The microlevel data set was based on a multi- stage stratified sample.8 Two sets of four levels of communities were identified for the urban and rural samples, respectively. City, street, neighborhood, and household were identified for urban China, and county, township, village, and household were identified for rural China.9 In 1991, 9,033 married cou- ples (18,066 individuals) were surveyed in six provinces, autonomous regions, and munici- palities, including Shanghai, Shandong, Guangdong, Shanxi, Jilin, and Ningxia (Institute of Population Studies 1994:16-21). Teams of one surveyor and one instructor conducted household visits, interviewing husbands and wives separately. This survey had a response rate of 100 percent10 (Institute of Population Studies, 1994), which was not unusual for officially approved Chinese surveys in the early 1990s (Bian and Logan 1996). A code assigned to each respondent represented his or her residential location. I constructed all the individual-level variables and three macrovariables from this data set (see Table A1 for descriptive statistics for all the individual- and community-level explanatory variables used in this analysis). Because surveys were clustered within neighborhoods

in cities and within villages in counties, this aggregation provides information about the more relevant communities for the respondents. The microlevel variables were as follows:

Individual education: number of years of schooling.

Birth cohort: age of the respondents in the survey year.

Work status: For urban residents, I coded those who were currently working as 1 and those who were not working as 0. I coded rural residents as working (1) if they engaged in one of the following as their primary activity: agri- culture, household husbandry, household workshop, household crafts, individual busi- ness, or employment in township enterprises.

Annual earnings: For urban residents, annual earnings corresponded to their monthly earnings (including salary and bonus) multiplied by 12 plus any additional annual earnings; for rural residents, I used their annual work earnings.

Ethnicity: I differentiated between the largest nationality (Han) and non-Han nation- alities, with members of ethnic minorities coded 1 and Han coded 0. A little over 10 percent of the respondents were members of 14 ethnic minorities, with Hui accounting for 8.8 percent; Korean, 1.6 percent; and Man, 1.1 percent. Because ethnic minorities tend to cluster in the same counties, with such low percentages, it was not possible to conduct a detailed comparison among these ethnic minorities after I controlled for the city-county clustering effect. Thus, I grouped all minorities into one category to contrast them with the dominant Han ethnicity.

Religion: I measured religion by three dummy variables, indicating affiliation with the three major religions in China: Islam, Christianity (Protestant and Catholic), and Buddhism, respectively, giving a value of 1 to those with these affiliations and those with no religion (87.3 percent) and other religions a value of 0 (.3 percent).

Chinese Communist Party membership: I used a dummy variable with a value of 1 to indicate Party membership and 0 otherwise.

Parenthood: I used a dummy variable with a value of 1 for those having at least one child and 0 otherwise. The macrolevel variables were these:


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Average education: the average number of years of schooling for respondents from the same city or county.

Gender gap in education: the difference in the average number of years of schooling between the two sexes in the same city or county.

Rural community: Regions designated as rural or urban in the sampling procedure were subject to separate sampling procedures. I designated as rural communities in which the respondents received rural survey instruments in the interviews and designated as urban communities in which the respondents received urban survey instruments in the interviews.11

The remaining macrolevel data were from the Provincial Yearbook Database, which con- tained county- and city-level variables for 1990 that were compiled from city and county statistical yearbooks.12 I measured economic development by the gross domestic product (GDP) of a city or county13 divided by the size of its population.

I used 10 items to measure the respondents' attitudes toward women's rights in the family and society:

1. Attitude toward women's careers: "Wives' career achievements should not exceed their husbands'" (1 = agree, 2 = no opinion, 3 = disagree) and "Women are inferior to men in career and in work" (1 = agree, 2 = disagree).

2. Attitude toward women's marriage rights: "A woman has the freedom to remarry after her husband dies" (1 = disagree, 2 = agree), "It is nothing to be ashamed of for a woman to divorce and remarry" (1 = disagree, 2 =

agree), and "It is nothing to be ashamed of to marry a divorced woman" (1 = disagree, 2 = agree).

3. Attitude toward women's sexual freedom: "Do you think that a wife can reject her husband's sexual demands" (1 = no, 2 = no opinion, 3 = yes) and "Do you think that a wife can express her sexual desires on her initiative" (1 = no, 2 = no opinion, 3 = yes).

4. Attitude toward the importance of having sons: "If only one child is allowed, do you prefer a son or a daughter?" (1 = son, 2 = no difference, 3 = daughter); "A woman will be respected only after she gives birth to a son" (1 = agree, 2 = disagree); and "A mother's

position will depend on her son's" (1 = agree, 2 = disagree).

DIMENSIONS OF GENDER ATTITUDES

The 10 items measuring gender attitudes can reduce to a smaller set of meaningful latent constructs. After I analyzed the substantive meanings of the measures, inspected the cor- relations among these variables (which ranged from .058 to .572, indicating multiple dimensions among them), and estimated a series of exploratory factor analytical models,14 I decided on four dimensions of gender attitudes:15 women's careers, which taps into attitudes toward women's outside employment and successful careers; women's marriage rights, which determines views toward women's remarriage; women's sexual freedom, which looks at attitudes toward women's sexual freedom within marriage; and the importance of having sons, which represents social, cultural, and economic preferences for having sons.

Identification of these latent constructs used confirmatory factor analysis described by the following equation:

y = kyq+E (A1.0)

where y is a vector of observed indicators, Xy is a matrix of parameters linking the latent constructs ir to the observed indicators, and E is a vector of error terms. The model assumes that each indicator is a function of an underlying latent construct r1 and an error term E that is independent of the latent construct16 (Joreskog and Sorbom 1988a, 1993). Each of the 10 gender-attitude items was treated as an indicator of only one underlying latent construct-one dimension of gender attitude. I estimated the measurement models for four subgroups, defined by gender and rural-urban community, and determined that there is no basis for rejecting the hypothesis that parameters of the measurement models were equal across subgroups.17 On the basis of these factor loadings, I constructed composite scores of gen-

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der attitude on these four dimensions. The final parameter estimates for the measurement model and the composite scores of gender attitudes are presented in Table 1.

ANALYSIS

The analysis involved five steps. I begin by describing the distribution of the four dimensions as measured by the 10 gender-attitude items. I then identify community-level variations in gender attitudes. Finally, I use a series of nested multilevel models to examine micro-, macro-, and cross-level interaction influences of education on gender attitudes.

Distribution of Egalitarian Gender Attitudes

The distribution of responses to the 10 items measuring gender attitudes was highly skewed, with the majority of respondents giving egalitarian answers to 7 of the 10 items, as shown in Table 1. Compared with their rural counterparts, urban residents of both sexes are more likely to have egalitarian attitudes and are less likely to agree that having sons is important. No systematic difference exists between men and women in urban areas: Women are more egalitarian on four items, while men are more egalitarian on two items; there is no gender difference on the remaining four items. In rural communities, women's attitudes tend to be less egalitarian than men's on all but one item, on which men and women are the same. Thus, rural women have the most traditional gender attitudes among the four groups. On all three items measuring attitude toward women's marriage rights, 80 percent of the rural residents and 90 percent of the urban residents are in the most egalitarian category, indicating a fairly uniform distribution of this attitude among both men and women in both rural and urban China. These results are summarized in the patterns in the composite measures. Constructed from factor loadings and standardized scores, these four measures all have a mean of 0 and a standard deviation (SD) of 1 for the total sample, but their mean and SD vary by both community of residence and gender.

CommunOty-Level Variations in Gender Attitudes

To measure the extent of community influences on gender attitudes, I estimated a basic multilevel model with a microcomponent and a macrocomponent (Bryk and Raudenbush 2002; Goldstein 1987). The micro- and macrolevel equations are as follows:

ATTITUDEjj - poj + Ejj

Aoj = Aoo + Hoj

(B1 .0) (B2.0)

where ATTITUDEjj represents one dimension of gender attitude for individual i in jth community. The ZBos are microintercepts; aOO is the macro-intercept; and the £jjS are macro-error terms, assumed to be normally distributed with a mean of zero and independent across communities. In such a model, the intraclass correlation coefficient that measures the pro- portion of variance in the outcome between groups can be calculated by using

p= Var(,uoj)

var(£i})+var(oj) which is also called the

cluster effect of Level 2 units. Table 2 shows the proportions of variance

in gender attitudes among the 44 communities of residence as measured by the intraclass correlation coefficients. These coefficients indicate substantial community-level variations in all the dimensions. This community- based variation is larger for women's attitudes than for men's on all four dimensions and greater on some dimensions than on others. The attitude toward the importance of having sons has the largest variation across communities for both sexes, indicating that this attitude is the most unevenly distributed across communities. Position on women's marriage rights has the smallest variation among communities, for both men and women. On all four attitudes, there is a larger community effect on women's attitudes than on men's. The largest gender gap in the community effect is found in the attitude toward the importance of having sons, which accounts for 28.9 percent of the variance in women's perspective, but only 20.1 percent of the men's. This finding indicates that the community environment explains a larger propor-

Table 1. Percentage Giving the Most Nontraditional Response to Items Measuring Gender Attitudes, by Community of Residence and Gender, Factor Loadings for Gender Attitudes, and Mean and Standard Deviation of Composite Measures of Gender Attitudes (in bold face)

Measurement Model for

Urban Rural Gender Attitudesf

Indicator Gender Attitudes Women Men Women Men Loadings Women's Career a, b, c, d .26e .19 -.34 -.21

(.77) (.80) (1.14) (1.09) Wives' career achievements should not exceed their husbands'. (Disagree) a, b, c 50.2 38.0 36.9 40.0 .62 Women are inferior to men in career and in work. (Disagree) a, b, c, d 74.3 65.6 51.6 61.1 .73

Women's Marriage Rights a, b, c, d .13 .17 -.25 -.11 (.86) (.80) (1.20) (1.09)

A wife can remarry after her husband dies. (Agree) b, c, d 93.6 94.4 85.4 90.4 .76 It is nothing to be ashamed for a woman to divorce and remarry. (Agree) b, c, d 90.3 91.7 79.8 84.2 .99 It is nothing to be ashamed to marry a divorced woman. (Agree) b, c, d 89.8 91.0 80.0 84.0 .94

Women's Sexual Freedom a, b, c, d .19 .32 -.49 -.22 (.84) (.78) (1.12) (1.08)

Wives can reject husbands' sexual demands. (Agree) a, b, d 62.3 66.8 45.8 53.8 .81 Wives can express their sexual desires on their initiative. (Agree) a, b, c, d 75.7 86.5 62.0 72.2 .89

Having Sons Not Important a, b, c, d .34 .29 -.56 -.35 (.65) (.67) (1.19) (1.14)

If only one child is allowed, do you prefer a son or a daughter? (Daughter)a, c, d 20.5 11.4 5.8 3.6 .42 A woman will be respected only after she gives birth to a son. (Disagree) b, c, d 93.0 92.8 69.6 75.8 .93 A mother's status depends on whether she has son(s). (Disagree) a, b, c, d 87.4 85.4 63.3 67.9 .86

N 4,472 4,450 4,513 4,511 17,946 a Gender differences among urban residents, p < .05 (two-tailed test). b Gender differences among rural residents, p < .05 (two-tailed test). C Rural-urban differences among females, p < .05 (two-tailed test). d Rural-urban differences among males, p < .05 (two-tailed test). 10 e Composite measures are constructed using the formula where CMk =, STINi x FSik where CMk is the composite measure for gender attitude k, STINi is the standardized ith indicator of

gender attitudes, and FSik is the factor loading of the ith indicator on construct k. f All parameters are statistically significant at p < .001 (two-tailed test). To facilitate a substantive interpretation, I recoded the variables such that high scores represent egalitarian attitudes.

Model Goodness-of-Fit Indices: BIC = -463.51, X2 = 254.52, df = 202, x2 /df = 1.26, Goodness-of-Fit Index = .96, Root Mean Square Residual = .067. The Cronbach's alphas are .60, .67, .65, and .64, respectively, for the four gender attitudes.

Note: Because the male and female samples (see footnotes a and b) are dependent samples (individuals in the male sample are husbands of the individuals in the female sample), a procedure to compare means between the dependent sample was used. For each husband-wife pair, a difference score Di was calculated. Then a t-test was conducted using t = D

kJ Nj hi

ls? r.

F

Education and Gender Eqalitarianism

tion of the variance in women's attitudes toward having sons than in men's. Women, as a subordinate group, are more vulnerable to the environmental context, while men, with more discretion, are less susceptible to structural influences.

Influences on Gender Attitudes: A Multilevel Analysis To analyze simultaneously the effects of individual- and community-level influences on gender attitudes, I estimated a series of nested multilevel models: Model A uses all the individual-level variables, including individual education; Model B adds community education to Model A; and Model C contains all the variables in Models A and B, plus cross-level interaction terms between individual education and community characteristics.

The microcomponent can be expressed as

ATTITUDE,i = Poj+ 1j ED,ij+ ,2jAGE-j + 3j CCPij + p4j WORKij

+ ,sj EARNi + P6j ETHNICij + P7j PARENTij

+p8j REG1 i + f9j REG2i + p1 10jREG3ij + ij (C1 .0)

where ATTITUDE,i represents one dimension of gender attitude for individual i in jth community, EDii to REG3ij are individual-level predictors of gender attitudes. EDyi, AGE,, and EARNij are measured as continuous variables, and the bars on these variables indicate that they are centered on their city/county means. The other variables are dichotomous variables, and are not centered so that their coefficients

indicate the effect of being a member of that group versus not being a member. The 3s are microlevel coefficients, the interpretations of which are similar to those for a multiple regression.

I applied the microcomponent of the model to each community on which I based my analysis, but I expected the effects of the microlevel variables to vary across communities. In the macrocomponent of the model, the microlevel intercept (Poj) and microcoefficients for individual education (flj1) are assumed to depend stochastically on macrolevel characteristics. The following set of equations express the macrocomponent of the multilevel model:

fo0/=coo+yro GDPi+Yo2RURALj+yo3AEDj+Yo4GAPEDj+goj (C2.0)

Pirj= a1O+l1 GDPi+Y1 2RURALiy1 3AED+Yl 4GAPEDj (C2.1) plkj=ako, where k = 2, 3, ..., 10 (C2.k)

where the as are coefficients and the [s are macro-error terms. AEDj and GAPEDj are continuous variables, and the double bars on these variables indicate that they are centered on their grand means. The microcoefficients are dependent quantities in these equations. These multilevel models, expressed by Equations C1.0 and C2.0-C2.K, are "slopes- as-outcomes" models18 (Bryk and Raudenbush 2002). When the community-level explanatory variables are excluded from Equations C2.0 and C2.1, these equations represent Model A. When the community-level explanatory vari-

Table 2. Proportions of the Variance in Gender Attitudes Among 44 Communities

p

Total Female Male Gender Attitudes (N = 17,956) (N = 8,985) (N = 8,961)

Women's career .185 .217 .150 Women's marriage rights .133 .161 .112 Women's sexual freedom .172 .183 .164 Having sons not important .232 .289 .201

Note: Intraclass correlation coefficient p = Var(go)

Var(eij)+ Var(ioj)

Community-level differences in gender attitudes are all significant at p < .001 (two-tailed test).

323 Ad

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ables are excluded from Equation C2.1, these equations represent Model B. Equations C1.0 to C2.k represent Model C. Table 3 presents the restricted maximum-likelihood estimates for the effects of education for these models. Estimates for control variables are presented in Table A2 for Model B.19

Before I describe the effects of education, I briefly discuss the effects of the control variables. Neither per capita GDP nor living in a rural community has any effects on gender attitudes, except for the positive effect of per capita GDP on one of women's attitudes. Among the individual-level variables, only Communist Party membership is consistently associated with gender attitude, while age, earnings, and ethnicity have some association with some dimensions, and work status, ethnicity, religion, and parenthood have little or no influence on gender attitudes.

Members of the Communist Party have more egalitarian gender attitudes than do nonmembers, probably because Party members are subject to lengthy and continuous socialization during recruitment (Bian et al. 2001) or are self-selected on their values con- gruent with the Communist Party ideology. They thereby adopt the values that the Party promotes, becoming representatives of the elite culture and sources of socialization for their associates. Age is negatively associated with three of women's attitudes, but only one of men's, indicating that cohort succession acts as a mechanism of change in gender attitudes among women but not among men. Earnings are positively associated with three dimensions of women's gender attitudes and only one attitude among men.

Individual Education There is strong support for my hypothesis that individual education is positively associated with gender attitudes. In Models A and B, individual education is associated with all four dimensions of gender attitudes for both men and women. Better-educated individuals hold more egalitarian perspectives on women's careers, marriage rights, and sexual freedom and are less likely to support the idea that having sons is important for women's status. This finding is consistent with prior evidence that individual education exerts a consistent effect on gen-

der and other attitudes, moving them in an egalitarian and liberal direction, although accounting for only a small amount of the variance (Fan and Marini 2000; Mason et al. 1976; Thornton et al. 1983; Thornton and Freedman 1979). In addition, in both Models B and C, the positive effect of individual education is larger for women than for men on all dimensions of gender attitudes. This finding indicates that individual education has a larger impact on women's gender attitudes than on men's. Additional years of education benefit women more than men in expanding women's perceptions of new opportunities and changing their frame of reference about themselves. Individual education thus empowers women more than it does men, which is consistent with findings from the United States (Fan and Marini 2000; Mason et al. 1976; Mason and Lu 1988; Thornton and Freedman 1979).

In comparison to Model A, in which individual characteristics explain less than 2.8 percent and 2.3 percent of the variance in gender attitudes for women and men, respectively, incorporating community-level variables in Models B and C substantially increas- es the amount of variance explained: 4.9 percent to 23.7 percent of the variance among women and 3.2 percent to 11.1 percent of the variance among men. These contextual influences account for larger proportions of the variance in gender attitudes than do individual characteristics, which demonstrates that attitudes are formed through an individual's interaction with the outside world and are socially constructed. Attitudes are susceptible not only to the effects of individual characteristics, but to the influences of the social environments in which these individuals live. Furthermore, on all four dimensions of gender attitudes, community-level variables account for more variance for women than for men. Spatial variations, particularly those found in community education and the educational gender gap, generally have larger ramifications for women's gender attitudes than for men's, indicating that women are more susceptible to contextual influences than are men. Last, on the attitudes toward women's sexual freedom and the importance of having sons, community education has a

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Table 3. Restricted Maximum Likelihood Estimates of the Net Effects of Individual- and Community-level Education on Gender Attitudes (N = 8,985 for women, N = 8,961 for men)

Women's Women's Women's Having Sons Career Marriage Rights Sexual Freedom Not Important

Women Men Women Men Women Men Women Men Model A: Individual-level Variables a

Individual education .030*** .018*** .022*** .020*** .027*** .025*** .024*** .021 *** (.004) (.004) (.005) (.005) (.005) (.004) (.004) (.005)

Model R2 .010 .006 .015 .010 .028 .025 .027 .023 Model B: Individual-level Variables + Community-level Variables b

Individual education d .030*** .018** .022*** .011 * .027*** .015*** .024* .012* (.004) (.005) (.005) (.005) (.005) (.005) (.005) (.005)

Average education in community e .080* .083* .020* .024* .110** f .112** f .118** f .139** f (.040) (.041) (.010) (.011) (.040) (.046) (.041) (.051)

Gender gap in education in community -.031 * .112 -.170* -.098 -.044* .075 -.027* -.037 (.015) (.078) (.081) (.073) (.020) (.075) (.012) (.055)

Model R2 .167 .046 .049 .032 .115 .076 .189 .109 By community-level variables .157 .039 .040 .023 .104 .063 .178 .102 By individual-level variables .010 .007 .009 .009 .011 .013 .011 .007

Model C: Individual-level Variables + Community-level Variables + Cross-level Interactions c Individual education d .031 *** -.002 .035* .017 .022* -.009 .024* -.004

(.004) (.018) (.014) (.014) (.011) (.024) (.011) (.016) Average education in community e .080* .087* .019* .023* .110* f .112* f .110* f .1 38** f

(.040) (.039) (.009) (.011) (.039) (.046) (.041) (.051) Gender gap in education in community -.031 * .111 -.170* -.099 -.045* .075 -.027* .102

(.015) (.078) (.080) (.073) (.021) (.075) (.012) (.078) Individual education x average education .004 -.002 -.003 -.005 .007 .013 -.001 .002

in community (.008) (.008) (.006) (.04) (.008) (.010) (.009) (.007) Individual education x gender gap in education

in community .012* -.004 .012* -.003 .008* .010 .007* .000 (.006) (.011) (.006) (.008) (.004) (.014) (.003) (.011)

Model R2 .167 .047 .049 .032 .115 .079 .237 .111 By community-level variables .157 .040 .040 .023 .104 .064 .198 .102 By individual-level variables .010 .007 .009 .009 .011 .015 .039 .009

a Net of age, Communist Party membership, work status, earnings, parenthood, ethnicity, and religion. b Net of individual control variables listed in a and community-level control variables, including per capita GDP and rural/urban. c In addition to the same individual- and community-level control variables listed in b, two cross-level interaction terms are also included: individual education x GDP per capita and individual education x rural community. d Gender differences in the size of these coefficients for all four dimensions of gender attitude are significant at p < .05 (one-tailed test). e The size of the coefficient for having sons not important is larger than the coefficient for women's marriage rights at p < .05 (one-tailed test). Estimates of the coefficients for the other variables in Models B and C are listed in Appendix Tables A1 and A2.

f The size of the coefficient for "Community Education" is larger than the coefficient for "Individual Education" at p < .05 (one-tailed test). * p < .05, ** p < .01, *** p < .001 (two-tailed test).

Q

Zs Q

z

cx

I C)

m

3

Q

I z "I c'

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larger effect than does individual education, again affirming the significance of contextual influences on attitudes, consistent with the larger community effect on women's childbearing behaviors in another developing country (Axinn and Yabiku 2001).

Community Education Average education in the community is positively associated with egalitarian gender attitudes of both sexes. These findings strongly support my hypothesis that gender attitudes are more egalitarian in communities with a high degree of educational attainment. For both men and women, there is a consistently positive effect of community- level education on gender perspectives. In both Models B and C, men and women in communities with higher average education are more likely to endorse gender equality in women's careers, marriage rights, and sexual freedom and are less likely to support the idea that having sons is important.

I found partial support for the hypothesis that community education has differential effects on different kinds of gender attitudes. The influence of community education on gender attitudes is the largest on the attitude toward the importance of having sons, the second largest on the attitude toward women's sexual freedom, smaller on the attitude toward women's careers, and the smallest on the attitude toward women's marriage rights. Only the difference between the attitude toward having sons and the attitude toward women's marriage rights is statistically significant. This pattern is consistent for both women and men, indicating that for both sexes, egalitarian gender attitudes are not uniformly distributed-they are more widespread on issues that are promoted by the elite at an earlier time than on those that are promoted at a later time.

Gender Gap in Community Education There is also support for my hypothesis that women in communities with large gender gaps in education hold more traditional gender attitudes than do women in communities with smaller gender gaps. Among women, the gender gap in education is negatively associated with all four attitude domains. The gender gap in education, however, has no

effect on men's gender attitudes in either model. This finding again confirms the preva- lence of contextual influence on women's gender attitudes.

Cross-level Interaction Between Community and Individual Education The results do not support my hypothesis that the positive effect of individual education is smaller in communities with higher average education. The positive effect of individual education does not vary by level of community education for either sex.

The findings strongly support my hypothesis that the negative effect of gender inequality in education in a community is smaller for women with higher levels of individual education. For women, on all four dimensions of gender attitude, the negative effect of gender inequality is lower for highly educated women. This finding indicates that individual education grants women more resources and inner strength to sustain their egalitarian gender attitudes when they encounter a negative social environment. It is also possible that highly educated women tend to mix in networks that consist largely of better-educated individuals, who are likely to reinforce their egalitarian views.

CONCLUSIONS

In this article, I analyzed micro- and macrolevel educational influences on egalitarian gender attitudes in China using a national individual sample and a city- or county-level data set. I compared the effects of individual and community education, and analyzed variations in these education effects by dimensions of gender attitude for the two sexes separately. I did so first through a confirmatory factor analysis to model gender attitude as a four- multidimensional construct measuring attitudes toward women: career, marriage rights, sexual freedom, and the importance of having sons. I then estimated micro-, macro-, and cross-level influences on these gender attitudes through a series of nested multilevel models.

The results showed that egalitarian gender attitudes are unevenly distributed in the Chinese population, with attitudes on some

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dimensions more egalitarian than on others and some subgroups of the population hold- ing more egalitarian perspectives than others. Individual attributes account for little of the variance in gender attitudes. Rather, education influences gender attitudes at both the micro- and macrolevels. Better-educated women are empowered to hold more egalitarian gender attitudes. More important, egalitarian gender attitudes trickle down through community education, and individuals in high-education communities are socialized toward ideas of gender equality. That community education has a larger positive effect on the attitude toward the importance of sons than on the attitude toward women's marriage rights indicates that the transition on the latter attitude occurred earlier and became more widespread via education. Women in communities with a large gender gap in education support egalitarian attitudes less.

Uneven Gender Egalitarianism

Egalitarian attitudes are unevenly distributed in different communities and among different attitude dimensions. Community characteristics account for more variation in both women's and men's gender attitudes than do individual characteristics. These differences in the explained variance indicate that the shift toward egalitarianism occurred sooner and to a greater degree in some attitudes than in others. This unevenness has three implica- tions.

First, this uneven gender egalitarianism is the result of an unequal distribution of education among Chinese communities. Communities that are considered essential for the communist rule receive heavy invest- ments from the state. Because of greater educational opportunities, residents of these communities generally attain more education. In these high- education communities, residents have more exposure to the values and conduct that are deemed appropriate by the elite and thus are more likely to shift their attitudes in congruence with the prevailing ideas. In contrast, individuals in less-well-educated communities receive less socialization influence from the dominant culture, have

less awareness of fashionable ideas and beliefs, and are thus less likely to change their attitudes accordingly.

Second, the uneven gender egalitarianism on different attitudes reflects the order of transition in the official culture. The egalitarian attitude toward women's marriage rights was initiated and promoted by the Communist Party at a much earlier time through educational institutions, the effect of which has trickled down to all communities. My analyses indicate that the transition on this attitude was largely complete by the time the data were collected: I observed a uniform distribution of the items measuring this attitude in the most egalitarian category; among all four gender attitudes, community characteristics account for the lowest amount of variance on this attitude; the size of community education effect on this attitude is also the smallest among all four attitudes; and this is the only attitude on which I did not observe age differences for either men or women. Because the transition in this attitude was initiated earlier than in other attitudes, change in this attitude has saturated high-education communities, approaching the most egalitarian ceiling. Since further change is less feasi- ble, little alteration has occurred at the later stage of transition in high-education communities, while change in lower-education communities has maintained its momentum. This difference in the pace of the transition result- ed in the smallest community-level variation and the smallest effect of community education for this attitude.

On the other hand, it was not until the 1980s that the Community Party started actively promoting an egalitarian attitude toward gender preference in offspring to facilitate and justify its "one-child-per-family" policy. Among all attitudes, this dimension has the largest amount of community variation, the largest amount of variance explained by the multilevel model, and the largest community-education effect. The attitude toward women's sexual freedom also started its transition at a later time; it thus has the second largest community-education effect and the largest age difference for both men and women, indicating an ongoing cohort-based transition among both sexes.


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That the positive effect of education (both individual- and community-level education) is larger among younger people lends further support to the conclusion that change in this attitude started later and is in the process of trickling down through education.20

Third, these findings show two sources of influence on gender attitudes in China: a domestic official culture promoted by the Communist Party and, in more recent years, the influence from the West. The latter influence started to make inroads into the Chinese population only in the 1980s, as is evident by both the relatively large community-level variation and the large effect of community- level education on women's sexual freedom and the large age effect on this attitude among both men and women.

These results expand the "trickle-down" thesis in the transition in values-that the social elite initially adopt egalitarian gender attitudes and then promote them through education (Inglehart 1990; Schreiber 1978). Both the better educated and those living in more educated communities are widely exposed to the elite culture and have a greater sensitivity to the "fashionable" posi- tions that are promoted by the elites. This uneven process of attitude transition has also been experienced by the U.S. population in its shift toward more egalitarian gender attitudes (Thornton and Freedman 1979).

Dual Effects of Education

Education influences gender attitudes in two ways. First, through direct and indirect experiences, an educational system exposes individuals to a socialization process through which they internalize what are deemed appropriate values. The educational system acts as a socialization agent in diffusing the dominant culture for individuals of both sexes. This socialization process appears to be gender neutral, influencing the attitudes of both sexes. As a result, communities with higher average levels of education are more likely to have more egalitarian attitudes toward the status of women. There is no gender-based difference in the quantity of influence exerted by community-level education.

Second, individual education is positively

associated with egalitarian attitudes for both men and women, and this empowerment effect is larger for women than for men. Increased individual education is associated with more egalitarian gender attitudes, particularly among women. Women with higher levels of individual education also tend to have more resources and more internal strength to sustain their egalitarian gender attitudes when they encounter a negative social environment. This finding is evident in the smaller negative effect of the gender gap in community education on gender attitudes for highly educated women.

My analysis demonstrates that it should not be assumed that the positive effect of education on egalitarian attitudes is a univer- sal phenomenon and that this positive effect can be applied to all societies at all historical times. Rather, the effect of education should be interpreted within the context of a specific society and historical period because the content of socialization reflects the varied sources of influence and assorted values that are promoted at different historical moments. The effect of education also differs for different subgroups of the population and for different attitudes, as is evidenced by the gender differences in the effects of individual education, as well as differences in the effects of community education on different dimensions of gender attitudes.

NOTES

1. For example, numerous documents have recorded that women, mostly elite women, were permitted to divorce and remarry in the Tang dynasty but not in the more recent Ming or Qing dynasties (Tao and Min 1994).

2. They are likely to persist either for a pro- longed period because it takes time for new learning (Jackman 1994) or permanently because values are relatively autonomous and independent of economic conditions (Damage 1994; Hamilton 1996) and economic relationships and gender relationships are interrelated but separate domains (Stacey 1983; Wolf 1985).

3. It has been argued that education also fosters conceptual growth because it is generally perceived as a learning process in which indi-

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viduals acquire broad knowledge, are exposed to different values, and develop sophisticated cognitive skills (Selenic and Steinberg 1969). Education fundamentally alters people by shift- ing their basic values, expanding their frames of reference, and stimulating cognitive and personality growth (John 1969; Lipset 1981). I could not test this effect with my data; thus, I do not discuss this effect of education in this article.

4. Women's share of fieldwork varied widely in the nation, depending on the intensity of cultivation, population density, type of crops, and climate (Davin 1975).

5. The expansion of the educational system in China is not a linear, monotonic process. Although elementary education has steadily increased over time (Hannum and Xie 1994; Lavely et al. 1990), the expansion of secondary education, particularly senior high school education, retracted during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution (Hannum and Xie 1994; Zhou et al. 1998). The retraction of college education during the same periods was much more severe than that of senior high school education (Zhou et al. 1998).

6. Young Pioneers of China is a mass organization for children aged 7-14 that trains children in leadership. Youths aged 15-25 are eligible to apply for membership in the CYL- a more elite organization than the Young Pioneers. Only the most advanced students are recruited into the CYL, which is separate from the class as a whole and holds private meetings; the CYL is also expected to main- tain strong roots in the class, assisting the Party in the moral-political education of youths. Its members are expected to be models for the young to follow.

7. Without longitudinal data, the macrolevel education and gender attitudes were measured contemporaneously; I cannot rule out a reciprocal relationship between community education and gender attitudes. However, there is evidence that changes in education preceded changes in gender attitudes (Lavely et al 1990; Wolf 1985).

8. These data were collected by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in collaboration with the Population Research Institute of the East-West Center in the United States. The actu-

al data collection involved the Population Institutes of the Academies of Social Sciences in Shanghai, Shandong, Guangdong, Shanxi, Ningxia, Jilin, Sichuan, Hebi, and Hubel; the Women's Studies Center in Hangzhou University; and the Institute of Population in Sudan University in Shanghai. I thank the University Service Center at the Chinese University of Hong Kong for making these data available.

9. Four survey instruments were used for women and men in rural and urban communities. Most parts of these four instruments are identical, except for the items that were pertinent to fertility behaviors for women and those that were pertinent to work and conditions of work for rural residents.

10. There are concerns that this high com- pliance rate implies that the respondents tended to report in a way that was consistent with what the government was advocating. The data show a substantial rate of defiance of the government's "one-child" policy, with more than 55 percent of the rural respondents and more than 20 percent of the urban residents preferring a son if only one child was allowed. On the other hand, a comparison with the 2000 Survey on Health and Family Life in China, which used various methods to ensure the respondents' confidentiality, found a moderate degree of under reporting of espousal hit- ting: only 1 percent of the men and 3 percent of the women reported being hit by their spouses in the 1991 data set that was used for this study, and 4 percent of the men and 9 percent of the women reported being hit by their spouses in the 2000 data set. It is unclear, however, whether this discrepancy reflects a change over time or a moderate underreporting of "unpopular" behaviors or ideas in the 1991 data set.

11. How communities were designated rural and urban in the sampling process is under documented, but it appears that these desig- nations are longstanding, as is evident by the different levels of administrative units that were selected for the urban and rural samples.

12. This database was assembled by researchers at the University of Michigan and compiled and edited by China in Time and Space and the Consortium for International Earth Science Information Network.


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13. The determination of GDP was production based, comprising the sum of the gross value of production added by three industries (heavy, light, and tertiary) in a city or county. A summation of these city or county- and indus- try-level GDPs constitutes the national GDP

14. I estimated a series of factor analytical models by choosing the number of factors from 1 to 6 or specifying the criteria of selecting the number of factors as eigenvalue > 1.00. Both approaches produced a four-factor model as the most parsimonious and substantively meaningful model. This four-factor model accounts for 57.38 percent of the variance.

15. I also tested a model in which these measures are consolidated into a single construct. The model goodness-of-fit indices indicate that this model does not fit the data as well as the four-construct model (BIC = 41.69, x2 = 162.55, df= 77, X2/df= 2.11, GFI = .78, RMR = .320), indicating the multidimensionality of the gender-attitude construct.

16. Since the indicators were measured on ordinal scales, I converted them to normal scores by using PRELIS, a preprocessor for LIS- REL, to estimate a matrix of polychoric correla- tions and an accompanying matrix of asymp- totic variances and covariances (Joreskog and Sorbom 1988b). I then estimated measurement models using the weighted least-squares fitting function in LISREL VIII, which is asymp- totically distribution-free (Joreskog and Sorbom 1988a, 1993).

17. I compared pairs of measurement models-one in which the parameters were con- strained to be equal across subgroups and one in which some or all the parameters were allowed to vary by subgroup-and determined that the former models fit the data as well as the latter models.

18. 1 estimated this model by a combination of maximum-likelihood and empirical Bayes procedures using the EM algorithm in hierarchical linear modeling (Dempster, Laird, and Rubin 1977). This multilevel model controls for the effects of the individual-level determinants and partitions the residuals into individual and community residuals. This approach attributes residuals that are unexplained by the individual-level multivariate model to community-

level variables, the interaction between com-

munity and individual characteristics, individual-level residual and community-level residual. So this approach helps avoid the "contextual

fallacy" when the residuals, which remain after the effects of an insufficient number of individual variables have been partialled out, are erro-

neously interpreted as contextual effects in terms of mechanisms occurring at the group level (Hauser 1970).

19. When no interactions terms are present, the regression coefficients reflect the general relationships at each level of the other independent variables. When the interaction terms are

present, the regression coefficients for the main effects reflect the "conditional" relationships in which all other independent variables but the one in question equal either the grand mean or the group mean. Because the coefficients for the main effects remain largely unchanged between Model B and Model C except for the effect of individual education for men, I derived

my conclusions about the main effects from Model B and my conclusions about the interaction effects from Model C. Since the results for Model C are similar to those for Model B, the estimates for control variables in Model C are not presented in this article, but are available from me on request.

20. This finding is based on additional models that I estimated for each of the four

gender attitudes for both sexes with (1) the interaction between individual education and age added to Model C; (2) the interaction between community education and age added to Model C; (3) two interactions listed in (1) and (2) added simultaneously to Model C; (4) and treating age as a series of

dummy variables (< 30, 31-40, 41-50, 51 +), I reestimated Models B and C and also reestimated the same models in (1), (2), and (3). When age is treated as a continuous variable, the interaction between personal education and age on men's attitude toward sexual freedom is significant. When age is entered as a series of dummy variables, the interaction between community education and the youngest age group (< 30) is significant.

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Er

APPENDIX

Control Variables-Rationale Economic development. Economic development has exerted a mixed effect on women's status in China.

It is associated with more equal treatment of children of both sexes (Johnson 1983; Michelson and Parish 2000) and increased educational and employment opportunities for women (Chinese Educational Commission 1996; Johnson 1983; Lavely et al. 1990; Whyte 1984). Increased household income also made communication media, such as the radio, television, newspapers, and computers, all of which played a role in changing attitudes and values, much more widely accessible. In addition, economic development is sometimes negatively associated with women's status in China. Following the rapid development from rural reforms in the late 1970s, female primary school attainment leveled off and female secondary education declined by 20 percent in rural China (Lavely et al. 1990). In developed rural communities, male heads of households have favored male offspring in allocating opportunities and resources once the household was reintroduced as the primary unit of production (Entwisle et al. 1995). Managers in highly developed cities asked female workers to "stay home," offering as compensation a small percentage of their base salaries (Wu 1995).

Rural residence. China has a marked rural-urban divide in gender inequality. Rurual women have limited access to eduation, particularly secondary education (Lavely et al. 1990). Changes in attitudes and public opinion appear to diffuse from metropolitan centers to smaller communities (Fisher 1978; Glenn and Hill 1977). In urban China, patriarchal family control on women diminished greatly after 1949, large- scale industrialization granted women high labor-force participation (Bian et al. 2000; Whyte 1984), and the nuclear family became the dominant family type. However, peasants continued their long-standing traditions, and few significant changes occurred in the traditional family structure in rural China.

Birth cohort. With the rapid expansion of the educational system, the younger cohorts tend to be better educated than the older cohorts. The impact of drastic social change is larger on the younger cohorts than on the older cohorts (Mason and Lu 1988; Thornton et al. 1983; Thornton and Freedman 1979).

Gender. In almost every country, women have more liberal attiudes on gender perspectives than do men (Chia et al. 1994; Fan and Marini 2000; Furnham and Karani 1985; Gibbons, Stiles, and Shkodraiani 1991; Herzog, Backman, and Johnson 1983; Ingelhart and Norris 2003; Loo and Logan 1977; Mason and Lu 1988; Nelson 1988; Seginer, Karayanni, and Mar'i 1990; Thornton 1989; Thornton et al. 1983).

Communist Party membership. Because applicants for Party membership undergo a lengthy screening process to socialize them to the values and culture that the Communist Party promotes (Bian et al. 2001), they become representatives of the elite culture and sources of socialization for their associates and thus adopt the more egalitarian gender attitudes promoted by the Party. I controlled the effect of this variable also because Party members are becoming better educated (Bian et al. 2001).

Work status. The gender attitudes of employed women are less traditional than are those of women who are not employed outside the home (Andersen and Cook 1985; Huber and Spitze 1981; Mason et al 1976; Molm 1978; Tallichet and Willits 1986; Thornton and Freedman 1979; Thornton et al. 1983).

Earnings. Women who draw more earnings from paid employment, agricultural activities, or other cash businesses are more likely to identify with a male provider role and less with a female caretaker role. I controlled this variable also because earnings tend to be correlated with education.

Parenthood. Entry into parenthood is negatively associated with egalitarian gender attitudes for both men and women in the United States (Fan and Marini 2000; Morgan and Wait 1987; Thornton and Freedman 1979). Child rearing demands time that conflicts with other activities, and this time demand leads individuals to view men as having an advantage in paid employment and women in parenting.

Ethnicity. Ethnic minorities in China generally have less exposure to the elite values and are less susceptible to ideas of gender egalitarianism; thus, they are more likely to adhere to traditional gender attitudes.

Religion. The type of religious affiliation may influence the socialization of gender attitudes. Individuals with religious affiliations have less-liberal attitudes than do those without in the United States (Mason and Lu 1988), but little is known about this relationship in China


332 ShI

Table A1. Descriptive Statistics of Community- and Individual-level Independent Variables

Women Men

Variables Mean SD Mean SD

Community-Level Variables Average education [AED] 7.76 2.39 7.76 2.39 Gender gap in education [GAPED] 1.79 1.08 1.79 1.08 Rural community (rural = 1) [RURAL] .61 .49 .61 .49 Log GDP per capita [GDP] 7.35 .67 7.35 .67

Individual-Level Variables Education [ED] 6.97 4.26 8.62 3.70 Age [AGE] 35.60 8.32 37.51 9.11 Party member (CCP = 1) [CCP] .10 .30 .28 .45 Work status (working = 1) [WORK] .64 .48 .94 .24 Log earnings [EARN] 7.14 .87 7.59 .67 Parenthood (N of Children $) [PARENT] .96 .21 .95 .21 Ethnic minority (Non-Han = 1) ETHNIC] .15 .36 .15 .35 Religion

Muslim [REG1] .11 .31 .10 .31 Christian[REG2] .01 .09 .01 .08 Buddhist[REG3] .04 .20 .03 .18

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Table A2. Restricted Maximum Likelihood Estimates of Macro- and Microlevel Influences on Gender Attitudes for Model B Not Displayed in Table 5 (N = 8,985 for women, N = 8,961 for men)a

Women's Women's Women's Having Sons Career Marriage Rights Sexual Freedom Not Important

Varialbes Women Men Women Men Women Men Women Men

Community-level Variables Log GDP per capita

Rural community (rural =1)

Individual-level Variables Age (x 10)

Party member (CCP = 1)

Work status (working = 1)

Log earnings

Parenthood (parent = 1)

Ethnic minority (Non-Han = 1)

Religion Muslim

Christian

Buddhist

Intercept

-2Log likelihood

.097 (.013) -.331 (.267)

-.060*** (.001) .169***

(.039) -.077* (.031) .065***

(.019) .056

(.053) -.121* (.058)

.128 (.070) -.110 (.117) .037

(.065)

-.035 (.078) .219

(.270)

-.001 (.002) .079*

(.032) -.165 (.191) -.047 (.031) -.078 (.048) -.174 (.102)

.158 (.141) .003

(.169) -.031 (.287)

-.059 (.115) -.060 (.233)

.005 (.018) .101*

(.040) .083

(.062) .067*

(.026) -.059 (.045) -.1 70* (.077)

.175 (.090) -.222 (.200) .081

(.053)

.121 (.082) -.098 (.188)

-.003 (.012) .059*

(.029) -.044 (.065) .084*

(.033) -.028 (.047) -.066 (.059)

.035 (.080) -.534** (.204) -.007 (.071)

.149* (.075) .094

(.173)

.054* (.022) .089*

(.041) .041

(.057) .023

(.023) .013

(.042) -.086 (.074)

.024 (.096) .103

(.097) -.055 (.133)

.019 (.080) .152

(.205)

-.070*** (.018) .110***

(.023) -.060 (.137) -.002 (.035) -.031 (.055) .033

(.075)

-.070 (.113) -.088 (.143) -.183 (.124)

.128 (.081) -.301 (.231)

-.006** (.002) .121***

(.028) -.006 (.055) .046***

(.020) .023

(.052) -.079 (.079)

-.067 (.122) -.165 (.135) -.071 (.179)

.013 (.080) .042

(.264)

-.037 (.020) .099***

(.030) -.061 (.174) -.017 (.040) .047

(.047) -.123 (.075)

-.002 (.115) -.103 (.120) -.063 (.211)

.032 .038 -.078 .105 -.317 -.031 -.037 -.115 (.181) (.153) (.152) (.156) (.128) (.176) (.143) (.141)

18,513 18,432 19,842 18,886 19,004 18,278 18,417 18,145

* p < .05, **

p < .01, *** p < .001 (two-tailed test). a Net of individual education, average education in community, and gender gap in education in community.

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Xiaoling She, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, University of California-Davis. Her main fields of interest are social stratification, sociology of gender, and quantitative methodol- ogy. She is currently researching market transition and gender segregation in urban China; gender attitudes in China: education and the Communist Party's state and foreign influences (with Yifei Zhu); and gender, housework, and household power in urban China (with Yifei Zhu).

The author thanks Yanjie Bian, Diane Felmlee, Mary Jackman, and Dina Okamoto for their helpful comments on this article. This research was partially supported by a Junior Faculty Research Grant from the Institute of Governmental Affairs and a Faculty Research Grant from the Academic Senate, University of California, Davis. Direct all correspondence to Xiaoling Shu, Department of Sociology, University of California, Davis, 1 Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616; e-mail: [email protected].

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