A female graduate throws her academic cap at the Asia University, Taiwan. Image by JodyHongFilms, available under Unsplash CC license.

01:45 pm | March 8, 2024

GREATER CHINA

Do China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan Mirror the Global "Liberal Women, Conservative Men" Divide?

Initium Media conducted data analysis to answer this question. Spoiler alert: yes.

By Da-Wun Sie

“A new global gender divide is emerging,” claims a Financial Times piece in January 2024, pointing to stats illustrating a yawning political and ideological chasm between 18-29-year-old men and women in numerous countries. Young women are more likely to be liberals, while their male counterparts are increasingly conservative. Although young UK residents generally skew liberal, for example, there has been a rapidly increasing gender polarization in the last ten years: young women are now 25 percentage points more progressive on immigration and racial justice than young men. The same disparity has reached 40 percentage points in the US and 30 in Germany. The most shocking polarization is now to be found in South Korea, whose young males have ‘turned to the right’ at dizzying speeds, reaching a disparity of 55 percentage points with their female peers over about a decade.

If the FT’s survey was repeated next door to South Korea, would Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan portray a similar male-female divide on ‘gender issues’ appearing over the same timeframe? Initium Media looked in detail at Wave 7 of the World Values Survey (for which surveys were carried out in 2018 in Hong Kong and mainland China and 2019 in Taiwan) to identify trends when it comes to gender issues. We selected three of the survey’s questions: to what extent do you agree that “on the whole, men make better political leaders than women do,” “when jobs are scarce, men should have more right to a job than women,” and “[divorce, in various situations] can always be justified, never be justified, or something in between”? The results show us how men and women differ in gender-related values in each place.

1: Do mainland Chinese, Hong Kong, and Taiwan people agree that “men make better political leaders”?

This question is relevant not just to ideas of political leadership as such but also to gender stereotypes such as women being naturally more emotional, having ‘female docility’ rather than firmness, lacking what it takes to lead and govern, and generally not being cut out to fill senior political posts. If we assume that those answering “disagree” and “strongly disagree” are more pro-equality, the results are telling; Taiwan and Hong Kong are similar, with no clear gap on this score in any generation, but mainland China is an outlier, with young women far more progressive on this question.

It was already a social consensus in Taiwan and Hong Kong in 2018/19 that ‘women are also suited to being political leaders’; even amongst the post-war Baby Boomer generation (born in 1956-1965) who are now in their sixties, only a 20% minority still clings to the old prejudices. Gender stereotypes are retreating across the board.

Looking at the picture intergenerationally, the prevalent story in Hong Kong and Taiwan is that men and women are becoming modern at a similar pace, neither outstripping the other. Thus, no generation shows a significant gender disparity (NB: in the youngest two generations in Hong Kong, women’s support for equality appears to decline, but this is not statistically significant, and support is broadly high in both generations, running at around 90%).

Things are very different when it comes to China. Traditional gender beliefs remain strong among male respondents, with not that much variation between younger generations and their grandparents – 40-50% believe women are not suited to be political leaders. Worth noting, however, is that 49-59% of women reject this stereotype, rising to 70% in the post-1990 generation. There are far fewer role models in China to prove that “women can do politics too”; if 70% of the youngest generation reject the men-first stereotype, this is possibly more thanks to the feminist movement and particular causes célèbres, as well as emergent women’s communities online. Men of the same generation have not enjoyed the same enlightened and supportive climate, which accounts for this generation’s enormous gender gap.

2: Do mainland Chinese, Hong Kong, and Taiwanese people think that “when jobs are scarce, men should have more right to a job than women”?

This question measures support for the traditional labor norm that sees men as breadwinners and women staying at home; given how mainstream it is by now for women to have jobs, the question contains the proviso “when jobs are scarce” to see if respondents feel women should yield the reins to men and give them a kind of ‘breadwinners’ priority.’

On this issue, the sexes in Taiwan and Hong Kong are no longer in lockstep; women have been have been progressing faster than men. In China, a significant discrepancy is that women are much more progressive.

Even in 2018/19, 60-70% of men and women in Hong Kong and Taiwan agree with the statement – however, the mainstay of the workforce, the generation born from 1976 to 1990, sees over 60% of women disagreeing, rising to over 80% of post-1990s women. Men in Hong Kong and Taiwan are still more supportive of gender equality than older generations: close to half (Taiwan) or over half (Hong Kong) when it comes to the 1976-1990 generation, rising to over 60% of the post-1990s cohort, but a gender gap is emerging since they are becoming progressive at a markedly slower rate than their female peers.

In other words, Hong Kong and Taiwan’s two youngest generations are more progressive than their male and female predecessors regarding gender stereotypes and labor roles. While they are moving in lockstep on gender stereotypes, they are moving at variable speeds on the issue of labor norms. Why has this gap appeared? Perhaps because new generations in Hong Kong and Taiwan have plenty of successful female leaders to look to, disproving the old stereotypes; the ideal ‘division of labor between the genders’ is more of a question of values, and values are less likely to be challenged just by the existence of objective facts. Only life experience and education can shift them.

Education and employment prospects for young women are getting ever better in Hong Kong and Taiwan, with the vast majority able and motivated to forge their careers, so the old norms do not count for much in their eyes. Many men don’t have the same lived experience, except in cases where they have helped women around them overcome pressure from traditional norms; for the most part, though, only education and culture shift their values, and it is a slow one. The question also feels less ‘vital’ to men, given that traditional norms call for women to be subservient to them; a considerable cohort of the former still cling to outdated gender norms as a result.

The picture looks similar in Hong Kong and Taiwan, except for one huge caveat: post-1990s women are more progressive than their forebears in both, but third-generation women in Hong Kong (born between 1966 and1975) long ago were rejecting traditional gender norms by over 60%, similar to their fourth-generation successors. In contrast, this phenomenon did not occur in Taiwan, where only the latter generations have awakened their consciousness. In other words, the ‘enlightened generation’ of Hong Kong women was earlier than in Taiwan. The reasons for this merit careful study – although women’s employment and career experiences tend to be the main drivers of mentality shifts, Taiwan saw a more considerable proportion of women attending university than men as early as 1988, earlier than Hong Kong (1998), so expanded higher education cannot suffice as an explanation of why Hong Kong women born in 1966-1975 gained a firm consciousness that their Taiwan peers still lacked and mainly threw off gendered labor norms one generation earlier.

Once again, it is an entirely different picture in China. Like gender stereotypes (see above), men have been slowly progressing; however, women, especially the generation of post-1990, do not identify at all with the old labor norms of their mothers’ generations; the results: another huge gender gap of 25 percentage points within the youngest generation. As discussed above, gender equality has seeped into the youngest generation of women’s mindsets but has had less effect on their male peers.

3: In mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, do people think divorce is justified?

The third and final survey question was, “[can divorce] always be justified, never be justified, or [is the answer] something in between?”. Respondents needed to answer on a scale of 1 to 10, 1 meaning “never justified” and 10 “always justified.” A score of 6 or above is considered a relatively progressive position.

On the face of it less about gender equality than monogamy and ‘marriage till death us do part’, this question hinges on whether people feel someone should endure unhappiness and even danger rather than at some point escaping their marriage. Of course, there are plenty of men trapped in unhappy marriages too, but many more women suffer at the hands of their husbands and the latter’s relatives; the hazards and opportunity cost of staying in the marriage are all the higher for them, so this survey question is very much one about gender equality.

China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan paint totally different pictures here. In Hong Kong, male and female views have evolved, but amidst the youngest generation, women’s views are moving much faster than men’s. In Taiwan, women are now clearly a class apart, the only ones whose outlooks are changing. In China, the youngest generation has been experiencing backsliding; post-1990, men are more conservative than their forebears.

The first four generations of Hong Kongers show no explicit male-female perception gaps, but 60% of women in the post-Handover generation are now progressive on divorce matters. However, their male peers remain at 50% or so. This ten percentage point gender discrepancy can be attributed to the stagnation among post-1990 men: the fourth generation (1976-1990) is uniformly more progressive than the third, but in the post-Handover generation, only women have remained on this track, while post-1990 men are at similar levels to their fourth-generation forebears.

This phenomenon may be a function of the fourth generation having come of age around the year 2000, a period when Hong Kong’s divorce rate rose the fastest, from 2% at the start of the 1990s to between 4-5%. People in the fourth generation saw many adults they knew get divorced and heard many more contemplating the same; acceptance of divorce as legitimate has soared as a result. The divorce rate peaked in 2011 and has since sunk, and that was when the post-1990s generation came of age; men in that generation are only as progressive as the previous generation. Post-1990s women, on the other hand, acquired special awareness when growing up and have been sensitized to issues such as overbearing in-laws, career sacrifices, pressure to have children, and domestic violence; they have realized what kind of a shackle an unhappy marriage can be for women, and have become more progressive than their 4^th generation forebears.

By the same token, the latest generation of women in Taiwan appears to have a rising gender consciousness, aware of the pressure a wife faces within marriage, particularly an unhappy one. More women have been progressive with each generation: 38% in the 3^rd, 45% in the 4^th, and 59% in the latest; this result closely mirrors the rise of the women’s movement in Taiwan: the 1966-1975 generation came of age in the mid-1980s when the Taiwan women’s movement went from strength to strength. Major feminist organizations were founded, such as the Awakening Foundation (1982), and from the outset, these were vocal about absurdities in Taiwan’s marriage framework. Warm Life (founded in 1984) is committed to eliminating social discrimination against divorced women. In the 1990s, a coalition of women’s groups advocated for a series of legal reforms relating to marriage and household issues: abolition of the male preference in civil law, amendments to the basic marital property system, and a new Domestic Violence Prevention Act, to name but three; this is most likely the backdrop to why more women, with every generation, have been looking critically at traditional marriage norms.

However, neither this women’s rights-based re-examination of traditional marriage norms nor the increase in marriages ending in divorce has had much impact on men in Taiwan. Only 35% of post-1990s men are progressive on divorce, unchanged from 35% in the post-martial law generation (post-1987) and not much higher than the 30% posted by the previous generation. Puzzling on the face of it, but the fact that post-martial law-men are not more progressive than their forebears is what has left Taiwanese men severely lagging behind Hong Kong in this respect since 1966-1975; previous generations of men are about equally progressive in the two places. No matter what caused this stasis among men, in a society where women are becoming more and more forward-thinking, the gender gap in attitudes to divorce was already ten percentage points with the post-martial law generation, rising to an astonishing 25 percentage points in the post-1990s cohort.

The gender gap within China’s post-1990s generation appears lower at 16-percentage points than in Hong Kong and Taiwan. But this is because only 36% of women are progressive on divorce, a much lower proportion than their Hong Kong and Taiwan counterparts. Meanwhile, only 20% of post-1990s men in China think progressively about this point, lower not only than Hong Kong and Taiwan but also than the previous generation (as much as ten percentage points higher at 31%). The drivers of greater progressiveness among women are broadly similar to those in Hong Kong and Taiwan: more post-1990s women have been sensitized towards feminism, and more people are becoming open-minded or even critical about the institution of marriage. China is an outlier, though, insofar as men in the same generation are more conservative about divorce. There is no consensus explanation of why this is, but one possible reason for their rigid views on the institution of marriage is that this youngest male generation faces intense pressure to marry – in a society with a surfeit of males and a changing labor market, which means that finding a spouse is hard.

Reaching men is hard

The figures tell a different story on these issues in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and mainland China. Both genders are evolving at the same speed on gender stereotypes in Hong Kong, and a broad social consensus has formed. The trend is also a progressive one on labor roles and attitudes toward marriage. Although, advancements seem to be occurring faster for women than for men. Taiwan trends close to Hong Kong on the first two points; when it comes to marriage as an institution, succeeding generations of women have become somewhat more progressive, but men remain almost fixed in their attitudes. Mainland China portrays a different story: successive generations of women are more progressive on all three measures; however, the youngest generation of men has failed to become more open-minded on any measure, even slightly relapsing about divorce.

Certain broader factors may explain these trends. On gender stereotypes, the improved status of women in Hong Kong and Taiwan and the spread of equality in education may appear sufficient to dispel many myths among both genders, especially among the youngest generation, which broadly rejects traditional views as out of touch – particularly given the role models provided by so many prominent women. In the face of ingrained tradition, however, while increased gender awareness may lead some people to re-examine the old norms, this is much more evident among women than men.

Although men and women are becoming more pro-equality about the issue of labor norms, the latest generation of women massively rejects traditional norms, whereas a significant minority of their male peers retain old-fashioned views, resulting in a gendered perception gap. On attitudes to divorce, the youngest generation of women skews very progressively, perhaps thanks to their gender consciousness-raising awareness of the difficulties married women face; so, they naturally conclude that if things aren’t right in a marriage, you should leave. There has only been a limited realization of the same kind of nature among men, with the young generation of men in Taiwan – particularly impassive; progressive attitudes to divorce are held by only 30% or so, poles apart from the attitudes of their female peers.

Differences in mentalities between young men and women in China are becoming stark. While the social consensuses in Hong Kong and Taiwan about gender stereotypes transcend gender, a relative lack of gender equality education in China coupled with improved but still seriously impaired status for women has left the youngest generation of men no more progressive than their male forebears, a majority still clinging to the myth that women are less able obstinately. Only the youngest generation of women has entirely let go of these outdated stereotypes and accepted women as equally capable of political leadership. The same is even more true for gender norms, with the youngest generation of men not only refusing to budge in their views on the division of labor but also hardening once again on the question of divorce. While post-1990s women continue to get more progressive on this point, their male peers are statistically less open-minded than the previous generation.

While efforts to promote gender equality have borne some fruit in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and improved status for women has led to changed perceptions, the feminist movement’s call for people to critically examine lingering inequalities and difficulties and adapt their value systems accordingly has been taken up much faster by women than by men.

Feminism currently has almost no impact on men in mainland China, with the youngest generation no exception; gender equality is practically only part of the youngest female generation’s vocabulary there.

We thank Initium Media for sharing this insightful data analysis with Echowall. The original version of this article, in Chinese, can be found at: https://theinitium.com/zh-Hans/article/20240201-dataphile-gender-divide-in-china-hongkong-taiwan

To learn more about the global gender divide in attitudes between liberal women and conservative men, see the following research examples:

Masculinity and Women's Equality: Study Finds Emerging Gender Divide in Young People's Attitudes, by King's College London

U.S. Women Have Become More Liberal; Men Mostly Stable, by Gallup

Author

Da-Wun Sie

Da-Wun Sie is a freelance data journalist based in Taiwan.