Mutable Inequality: Meritocracy, Gender, and the Making of the Chinese Academe, 1912-1953

Bamboo Yunzhu Ren, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Chen Liang, Nanjing University
James Z. Lee, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

One of the most radical and important social changes in recent history is the opening of tertiary education to women and their entry into the professional workplace in the twentieth and twenty-first century. This paper uses the China University Student Dataset-Republic of China (CUSD-ROC), which collects 150,000 individual undergraduate student records from 27 universities between 1912 and 1953, the China University Student Dataset-PhD (CUSD-PhD), which records 4697 Chinese post-tertiary students who studied overseas for a PhD during the first half of the twentieth century, and the China Workforce Dataset - Republic of China/People’s Republic of China (CWFD-ROC/PRC), to understand the early history of female tertiary education and professional employment and the implications of this history for understanding how what in many societies are durable inequalities are in China, mutable inequalities. By analysing and contrasting student spatial and social origins by gender as well as different gender preferences for student majors, we demonstrate the mutability of gender and occupational categories in Republican China. While the Late Imperial examination elite were the sons and grandsons of civil officials who came from a national rural population of landed property gentry, the Republican university elite were the sons and daughters of urban businessmen and professionals concentrated largely in China’s most developed regions Urban Chinese women from well-off families were not only able to pursue higher education but also employment especially in the academe. The opening of tertiary education to women and their entry into the professional workplace however was in recognition of the potential female contribution to resolve a perceived national crisis rather than a recognition of female rights to education and employment. We further suggest that these patterns of female education and employment during the first half of the twentieth century therefore reflect historic changes in individual female choices rather than political struggle.

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 Presented in Session 152. Different Beginnings-Comparative Perspectives on Early Tertiary Education