This study is constructed of life course profiles of the educational trajectories of a cohort of rural girls from a village in the mountains of western China during critical educational reform years. Observational date were collected annually from 2000-2022. Findings show that even in remote mountainous region of China, village girls attained…

This article, based on a qualitative research study with 66 rural female students attending five public universities and one public college in China, examines how these students negotiated the dominant discourse of quality (suzhi), which represents them as lacking in capacity and knowledge. Since the 1980s when China started implementing its…

Our study sought to understand changes in gender inequality in education across four generations of rural Chinese women's educational experiences in a small community in southern China. The 24 interviews and numerous informal conversations with 12 women showed that gender-based favouritism for men and against women undergirded family expectations,…

While infanticide or sex selective abortion in rural areas of the world may seem to have little to do with a famous musician who is a domestic abuser from the first world who avoids criminal punishment while being applauded and glamourized, the message going out to girls is consistent: they are not valued in the same way that boys are. In order to…

The world has a mixed record towards achieving EFA [Education for All] and the MDGs [Millennium Development Goals] in relation to the targets on gender equity in basic education. For researchers and practitioners, this raises the question of which factors influence the processes leading to the improvement of access and quality of girls' education…

In this article, the authors focus on a poor rural area in northwestern China and investigates whether the gender attitudes of mothers can be linked to their plans for educating their own children in the future. Using recent longitudinal data from the Gansu Survey of Children and Families (GSCF), a survey of rural 9-12-year-old children, families,…

Using data from two surveys in three counties among which the prevalence of uxorilocal marriage varies greatly, this paper analyzes effects of marriage form, as well as individual, family, and social factors on son preference in the context of strict birth control in rural China. It is shown that, under the Chinese patrilineal joint family system,…

This study analyzes the variation in one measure of son preference that is of particular relevance in rural China: whether a woman considers it important to have a son, and the reasons why sons are important. To summarize our conclusions, we find that the expectation that a son will provide financial support in old age is strongly associated with…