Beijing, The Chinese Communist Party has long portrayed the protection of women's rights as one of its achievements but studies have found that their role in public life has diminished in recent years, particularly at the highest levels of political and policy leadership.
For decades, the Party promoted Mao Zedong's famous slogan that "women hold up half the sky" as a guiding principle for gender equality. But the narrative in China's official media has shifted in recent years, increasingly emphasising women's domestic and familial roles, according to a recent study that analysed articles in the People's Daily, the CPC's official mouthpiece.
The ruling CPC, which exercises tight political control over the country, has for decades claimed that women have played an active role in "socialist modernisation and reform and opening up".
However, a widening gap in the portrayal of women began to emerge in the late 1990s, according to the study by two Hong Kong-based researchers.
Published in the journal Frontiers in Sociology in May, the study found that the People's Daily had increasingly associated women with domestic and family roles while giving less prominence to their roles in the public sphere.
The researchers, Jia Wang of Hong Kong Polytechnic University and Ruiyu Zhang of the University of Hong Kong, analysed more than 125,000 articles published in the People's Daily between 1990 and 2023.
{{/usCountry}}The researchers, Jia Wang of Hong Kong Polytechnic University and Ruiyu Zhang of the University of Hong Kong, analysed more than 125,000 articles published in the People's Daily between 1990 and 2023.
{{/usCountry}}They identified vocabulary associated with the public sphere, including terms such as "leading woman", "fighter", "career" and "entrepreneurship", and words associated with the private sphere, such as "family", "childbearing", "housework" and "loving mother".
The researchers then examined how frequently neutral terms such as "female" and "woman" appeared near words from the two groups over the years.
The study found that the association between women and the private sphere remained strong throughout the period analysed, according to the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post, which published an article covering parts of the study on Sunday.
In the early 1990s, references linking women to public roles were also relatively strong, nearly matching those associated with the private sphere.
One example 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".
From the late 1990s onwards, however, the gap widened, with references linking women to public roles declining sharply, the study found.
For instance, in 2017, People's Daily ran an article titled "Giving birth is easy, raising children is difficult", in which the paper quoted a woman who had left work and stayed at home when her child entered primary school.
The gap reached its widest point in 2018, which the researchers said pointed to a "decisive rhetorical shift", with women increasingly associated with domestic and familial roles rather than the public sphere.
From 2020 onwards, however, a modest rebound in references linking women to public roles was observed. The authors suggested this could reflect demographic pressures, labour market needs and international attention to gender equality, the Post reported.
The researchers said the changing rhetoric in state media was closely intertwined with "broader institutional and ideological shifts".
The decline in women's representation has also been evident at the highest levels of China's political hierarchy.
There have been no women among the 24 members of the Politburo since 2022.
No woman has ever served on the powerful seven-member Politburo Standing Committee, China's highest-ranking decision-making body.
Out of the 31 provincial party heads, only one woman figured.
Even in the party membership, about 30 per cent were women among its 101 million members.
Other studies reported that women cadres are disproportionately assigned to education, health, culture, sports, civil affairs, which are seen as "suitable" but not paths to higher positions in the party hierarchy.
The fast-track to the Politburo runs through economic management, finance, industry, provincial governorships, and central ministries - areas where women are rarely placed.
The findings come against the backdrop of China's efforts to address its demographic challenges.
China ended its decades-old one-child policy in 2016, allowing all couples to have two children.
In 2021, it introduced a three-child policy as the country faced declining birth rates and an ageing population.
There are also studies that have examined the implications of these policy changes for women's employment and gender equality.
An analysis by the Organisation for Research on China and Asia has argued that while projecting a global image of gender equality, China continues to instrumentalise women's reproductive capacities to meet population goals, constraining women's reproductive autonomy to fulfil its population objectives.
An article in Sichuan University Journal earlier this year said the policy to have more children produces a "motherhood penalty". As a result, women's labour force participation falls, wages drop, and promotion is blocked. There is no comparable penalty for men, it said.
This article was generated from an automated news agency feed without modifications to text.