Single Child Daughters and Gender

Sammanfattning: The purpose of this paper was to evaluate how the single child daughters born under the one-child policy perceive gender equality and their experience of gender equality or inequality in their everyday lives. China, despite today having the world largest population, implemented the one-child policy in 1979 in order to curb the exploding population. As the one-child policy implied, each couple is only allow to have one child. Under the nature law of selection, this child could be either a girl or a boy. As a result, the daughter is no longer treated secondary to her brother when there were limited resources as her parents would cater to the only child they have. In-depth interviews were conducted with a panel of the first generation single daughters now in their 20s. Despite living in patriarchal society, analysis of the interviews shows little of gender inequality felt or experienced by these first generation single daughters so far. However, it is still too early to tell if these daughters would defend their rights when they were challenge later in work or in their families. Nonetheless, I would like to argue that the position of these daughters would eventually help to elevate the status of women and gender equality in China.