China state media increasingly casts women in domestic roles, study finds

Beijing,UPDATED: Aug 9, 2026 13:48 IST

A study of China’s state-run People’s Daily has found that official messaging has increasingly portrayed women in domestic and family roles rather than in public life, marking a shift from the Chinese Communist Party’s long-standing claim that it protects women’s rights. For decades, the party promoted Mao Zedong’s slogan that “women hold up half the sky” as a guiding principle for gender equality.

The findings come as women’s presence in China’s top political structures has also fallen. There have been no women among the 24 members of the Politburo since 2022, no woman has ever served on the seven-member Politburo Standing Committee, and only one of China’s 31 provincial party heads is a woman. Researchers and other studies have linked this trend to broader institutional and ideological shifts, as well as policy pressures around births and family life.

The study, published in Frontiers in Sociology in May, was conducted by Jia Wang of Hong Kong Polytechnic University and Ruiyu Zhang of the University of Hong Kong. The researchers analysed more than 125,000 articles published in the People’s Daily between 1990 and 2023. They tracked how often neutral terms such as “female” and “woman” appeared close to words linked to the public sphere, including “leading woman”, “fighter”, “career” and “entrepreneurship”, and to private-sphere terms such as “family”, “childbearing”, “housework” and “loving mother”. According to the South China Morning Post, which reported on parts of the study, the association between women and the private sphere remained strong throughout the period.

In the early 1990s, references linking women to public roles were also relatively strong and nearly matched those linked to the private sphere. One example cited was a 1992 People’s Daily article titled “In the past, women were said to be inferior to men; today, they hold up half the sky”, which described a labour competition and said women played an active role in “socialist modernisation and reform and opening up”. But the study found that from the late 1990s onwards, the gap widened sharply as references linking women to public roles fell. In 2017, for instance, the newspaper carried an article titled “Giving birth is easy, raising children is difficult”, which quoted a woman who had left work and stayed at home when her child entered primary school. The gap was widest in 2018, which the researchers said pointed to a “decisive rhetorical shift”. From 2020 onwards, there was a modest rebound in references linking women to public roles, which the authors suggested could reflect demographic pressures, labour market needs and international attention to gender equality.

The study said the changing rhetoric in state media was closely tied to “broader institutional and ideological shifts”. Other studies have also found that women cadres are disproportionately assigned to education, health, culture, sports and civil affairs, areas seen as “suitable” for women but not as routes to higher office in the party hierarchy. By contrast, the path to the Politburo usually runs through economic management, finance, industry, provincial governorships and central ministries, where women are rarely posted. Women make up about 30 per cent of the Communist Party’s 101 million members.

The findings come as China continues to respond to declining birth rates and an ageing population. The country ended its one-child policy in 2016 and allowed all couples to have two children, before moving to a three-child policy in 2021. Studies on these policy changes have examined their effect on women’s work and gender equality. An analysis by the Organisation for Research on China and Asia said that while China projects a global image of gender equality, it continues to use women’s reproductive capacities to meet population goals, limiting women’s reproductive autonomy. An article in the Sichuan University Journal earlier this year said the drive for more children creates a “motherhood penalty”, under which women’s labour force participation falls, wages decline and promotions are blocked, while men do not face a comparable penalty. Taken together, the studies and the data on political representation point to a clear shift in how women are portrayed and placed in public life in China.

With PTI Inputs

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