Professor Liang Chen from the School of History of Nanjing University published an article entitled "Social Transformation and the Educational Pattern of Female College Students in Modern China" on Social Sciences in China. Based on the personal information of students in the archives, the article integrates official statistics and other relevant documents, and adopts research methods that combine qualitative and quantitative, diachronic and cross-cultural co-temporal comparisons to quantitatively present the characteristics of the group in terms of the form of education, the proportion of the size of the group, the social origin, and the professional preference of the female college students in modern China, as well as to explore its academic significance.
Unlike the not-so-backward gender ratio and the relatively relaxed campus environment, female college students in modern China have higher requirements than their male counterparts in the two most important source dimensions, geographic and social, and the actual threshold for women to enter higher education is very high. Data analysis shows that the geographical origin of college students is mainly in metropolitan and southeastern areas, and whether it is place of origin or home address, the geographical concentration of girls is higher. Women are less likely to move geographically through higher education than men. Behind the differences in geographical origin are the different attitudes towards women’s education in different regional societies and different occupational families. In terms of family economic conditions and acceptance, urban families, especially middle- and upper-class families in metropolitan areas, particularly whose parents work as civil servants or in professional and technical positions, are more willing to provide education for girls; rural and small town families, even landlord families with a certain economic capacity, are less enthusiastic about educating girls. The gap between the proportion of boys and girls from peasant families is particularly large - 5% and 20% of boys in Shanghai and other regions come from peasant families, respectively, while the ratio of girls is only 1% and 5%. It was only after the founding of New China that the opportunities for children of different genders in different occupations or classes to enter university were further levelled.
Modern female college students also show specific preferences in choosing school, academic majors, etc. In terms of schools, girls seem to prefer church universities rather than national universities. Advantaged parents are more willing to send their daughters to church schools, especially women's church universities, even though they know that these universities are smaller in scale and have limited faculty compared to national universities. In terms of majors, university majors generally do not restrict students' gender, and the proportion of girls choosing agriculture, business and science is close to that of boys. Only a few girls choose engineering - 36% of boys choose engineering, while only 8% of girls choose it, a difference of more than 4 times.
Overall, the transformation of modern society not only allows Chinese women to enter universities, but also have a certain amount of space for academic and career choices, but the constraints of family and society are also omnipresent. Modern Chinese women's access to education and entry into the workplace is regarded as an anti-traditional movement under the influence of Western thought. However, beyond the disruption of tradition, Chinese women’s experiences in education and careers differ in many ways from those of the Western countries they emulate.
Source: 社會(huì)轉(zhuǎn)型與中國(guó)近代女大學(xué)生的教育樣態(tài)-中國(guó)社會(huì)科學(xué)網(wǎng)
Writer: Guo Junlin
Editor: Ye Chengwei
