Half the Sky? - A Conversation with UN Women's Julia Broussard

Yesterday I met with Julia Broussard, Country Manager of the Beijing Office of UN Women. Julia has worked and lived in China for almost 20 years, and has headed this office for four, so she had a lot to share on the state of gender issues in China. The office's main purviews are violence against women (ending it), economic empowerment, job discrimination (stopping it), political participation (increasing it), and more generally looking at gender in Corporate Social Responsibility and in the media.

We had a great conversation that touched upon a lot of things, but I'll try and structure this post a little bit (and annotate it with some other stories and pictures). One of my main takeaways was that, on the whole, things are getting better in the gender space, but there's still a whole lot to do---not mention new challenges and opportunities that are coming up as the country changes and urbanizes.

A lot of the stuff I wrote about earlier regarding the effects of the One-Child policy remain true, particularly in the villages. An important thing she mentioned, though, is the effect of the Hukou System on women as the country urbanizes. First off, back in the 1970s, when China started to industrialize, it set up second and third tier cities (smaller than Beijing and Shanghai, the "first tier" or megacities) to host heavy and light industries. The government forced people to relocate to those cities to staff those factories---but they weren't allowed to bring their spouses or families. So these cities wound up having extremely skewed sex and age ratios. Heavy industry cities (like Dukou, which made auto parts) were male-dominated, while light industrial cities (like Jiayin, which produced textiles) were "cities of women." This imbalance had a strange consequence on the next generation's demographics.

More recently, when men alone migrate to cities for industrial work and leave their wives and families behind (because their hukou means they won't have access to any services in those cities), a greater household burden falls on the women that are left behind: not only do they now have to cook, clean and take care of the children as they did before, but they also are responsible for providing ALL of the labor for their family's agricultural and farming collective, for at least half of which the male had been responsible previously.

In other situations, when both the mother and father migrate to cities for work, they leave the children in the care of the grandparents. When this happens en masse, the whole social safety net of a village is broken. And worse, girls that have been left behind in villages often become victims of sexual violence when their parents are not around to keep them safe. That said, even if children were to migrate to cities along with their parents, because of Hukou, they would not have access to urban schools or any social services, leaving them in the streets in the daytime and perhaps victim to the same kinds of crimes. Two options to fix the situation are to increase income generating activities in or closer to rural areas so that parents don't have to migrate (this comes with other challenges of directly addressing rural poverty in a scalable way); or to relax Hukou to let families migrate together (though a sudden elimination of that sort might overwhelm urban services).

Meanwhile, heavy industry, dominated by men, pays more than light industry. The owners of light industrial operations often PREFER to hire women because they reportedly can be paid less and are retained for longer---lacking ambition to earn more money, they stay at factories even long after marriage.

In urban areas, even white-collar professions suffer from major gender discrimination. Even college education women face job discrimination, particularly in the technology, science, military-defense, and Foreign Service areas. And in education, women are required to have higher exam scores to gain entrance to these academic fields where they are less represented---a sort of reverse affirmative action. And yet, female-dominated fields like languages have quotas and lower test score requirements for men. Sort of an inverted scenario, huh?

All that said, women's representation in business and politics (by the numbers) is statistically higher than that in many other countries. In business, over 25% of senior managers are women (compared with around 21% in the US). And in politics, though most pictures of official ceremonies look like old boys clubs, with dozens of men dressed in penguin suits, the National People's Congress, the "legislative body" of the PRC, has over 22% women's representation---higher than the global average of 17% in the lower house of the legislature. We can't really know whether this has been enforced by quota or is just 'organic,' though, since the operating procedures of the NPC are so opaque. In an earlier NPC, here were a couple of the leading ladies:

They've never, however, gone above the Standing Committee level.

Speaking of opacity, let's talk about some statistics. The number of cases of sexual harassment and sexual violence per province are---well, we don't know, because official statistics of negative incidents like that are not recorded. Or, if they are, they're not openly shared. Julia says that UN Women has tried to do their own surveys to obtain their own statistics, but the government has never been keen enough on finding out to let them. Anecdotally, these kind of incidents definitely happen. They may not happen quite as often as they do in other parts of the world---Julia attributes this to a trait in Chinese culture that supposedly does not encourage as open an expression of any emotions (including lust) as they would elsewhere---but they do happen. Of course, a major reason they go unreported or underreported is that women are not as inclined to be vocal about what happens to them, for fear of their reputation (and the blowback of any legal or other subsequent actions) and also because of that issue of expressing emotions.

What's good is that the internet is changing that quite a bit. Sites like Weibo---China's version of twitter, which is locked here---are important means of complaining about or reporting sexual harassment while still maintaining relative anonymity and "saving face." And this avenue has also turned into a more open, wide-scale protest. In southwest China, women have organized to protest loudly against violence on women.

And in Shanghai a few years ago, when a woman was sexually harassed on the subway, the transit authorities posted a picture of a woman they deemed "scantily clad," and warned women that if they dress provocatively, they invite harassment. In response, a number of women dressed in head-to-toe provocative covering, with signs that said “I can be sexy, but you can’t harass me.” The protest was picked up by the media and went viral---with the organizers being given awards for standing up for womens’ rights. It was around that time---thought it wasn’t actually related---that the Shanghai government legally defined sexual harassment as a crime and identified mechanisms to enforce the laws and protected channels for women to seek redress.

(More recently, after the 17-year old son of an official was accused of gang-raping a Beijing woman, an idiotic Tsinghua University professor argued that "To rape a bargirl does less harm than to rape a good woman," presumably implying that "bar girls are more likely to consent to sex, and therefore it's more acceptable to rape them than it is to rape a normal girl." Fortunately, according to the website Shanghaist, "his message...outraged pretty much everyone.")

Workplace harassment also remains a major issue---as do equal compensation, hiring practices, and other workplace gender issues---and advocates like Guo Jianmei of the Beijing Zhongze Women’s Legal Counseling and Service Center are working with employers and the government to work against it. Both she and Julia say that it was the 1995 UN 4^th World Conference on Women, which was held in Beijing, that really put the issue of gender equality on the map in China. The term “sexual harassment” officially entered the country’s legal lexicon and official steps began in earnest.

One thing Julia is a little concerned about is the changing media landscape. More movies, TV shoes, and especially advertisements objectify women---and reshape images of women’s beauty---in ways that have been prevalent in the United States, for example, for far too long.

There’s been an increased sexualization and objectification of women in ads that may not be very healthy for gender equality in China.

But as long as more people are talking about it---and organizing for it, and advocating, and empowering themselves and others---the upward trend will hopefully continue unabated.