Leftover in China

by Roseann Lake

  Given their educational edge, many of China’s young women are especially well positioned to weather their country’s transition to a knowledge economy, but as Dr. Peng hinted earlier, what looks good on paper doesn’t always translate into practice.

  Until it was closed in 2016, the Beijing Zhongze Women’s Legal Counseling and Service Center was one of China’s most important non-profit organizations for enforcing gender equality. Founded in 1995 around the time of the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women—which took place in Beijing—it was created during a period when China was trying to remake its image and gain international acceptance following the 1989 military suppression of pro-democracy demonstrations around Tiananmen Square.

  I visited the center in 2013 to meet with a lawyer named Lu Xiaoquan, who was working tirelessly to put legal pressure on several universities across China that were requiring female applicants to have a higher gaokao score than male students, as a precondition for admission. (The gaokao is the closest thing China has to the SAT.) Back during the time when Christy took the exam, parents would flood temples with offerings, but today with a bit more money to throw around, the rules are different. Parents sometimes check their children into special “study suites” at designated hotels, billed as the places where past high-scoring gaokao takers are said to have studied their way to success. “Study nannies,” charging up to US $50 per hour, have even become an option for moneyed parents who don’t trust their children to put in the requisite cram sessions without a bit of stern supervision.

  During the exam period, which lasts two days, cities cede themselves to the needs of their students. Internet cafés are closed down, construction stops, traffic is rerouted, and no-honking zones are established. Local newspapers have reported on taxi drivers in Anhui province who give free rides to students on their way to the test, and select McDonald’s that have offered free breakfasts for aspiring university students. As chronicled on the popular Chinese web portal, NetEase, in Sichuan province in 2012, local hospitals were flooded with test-takers who studied while hooked up to oxygen machines and intravenous drips of amino acids in order to improve their concentration. At one school in Hebei, the IV drips were offered to students to use in the classroom. Photos show that the IV bags were suspended in the air by a long, dangling rope, which swooped clothesline-style across the classroom, giving students access to a bag from their desks at the discount price of 10 RMB ($1.80).

  According to Christy, it has even become common for young girls to take birth control pills during the month before their exam. She cites her younger cousin Emily as an example. At no point during her exam preparation time was there any risk of Emily becoming pregnant. She also wasn’t suffering from bad acne, intolerable menstrual cramps, irregular cycles, or any other of the reasons a non–sexually active young woman may be on the pill. She was simply on it because as an aspiring writer with high hopes of attending China’s top journalism school, she didn’t have a minute of her studying time to waste on maxi pads and monthly blues. As a result, she pumped her 105-pound frame with double doses of estrogen and progesterone.

  “It’s a very normal thing for young girls in China to do before a big exam,” explains Dr. Jin, a gynecologist at the Beijing Sino-American Gynecology hospital. “There are no guarantees, but eight to ten grams of birth control for ten consecutive days before an exam should be enough to keep menstruation at bay for the month.”

  Yet pill or no pill, Chinese women are outperforming their male peers on the gaokao exam. According to data from the China University Alumni Association, female students account for 52.65 percent of the top-scoring students across China’s 31 provincial-level regions. Since 2012, they have consistently snatched more and more top slots from male students, even in the sciences, which were formerly the stronghold of the boys. And it’s not just in the realm of testing that young Chinese girls are excelling. According to data from the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, female students from elementary school to junior high are now outscoring their male counterparts in every subject—math, physics, and chemistry included. While this educational excellence should be something to commend China’s young female students for, the stack of correspondence from the Chinese Ministry of Education (MOE) that Lu shows me tells a different story.

  Lu explains that discrimination has been happening to a limited degree since 2005, but became notably more severe in 2012, which is when he and his colleagues decided to take action. It mainly affects students who choose ti qian pi se, or subjects that are eligible for a type of “early admission.” These subjects include foreign languages (with the exception of English), performing arts, international relations, broadcast journalism, cinema studies, and military disciplines, as well as li ke, or science-related fields.

  For example, in 2012, the admissions requirement for students seeking to study foreign languages at China’s prestigious Renmin University was a gaokao score of 601 for male students, and 614 for females. At Beijing Foreign Studies University, those same scores for foreign languages were 582 and 590, for males and females, respectively. For science-related fields, the numbers rose to 598 and 639, a discrepancy of 41 points.

  Making it clear in his correspondence with the MOE that setting different gaokao scores for each sex violated the forty-eighth clause of the Chinese Constitution—among other charters and laws—Lu attempted to find out how and why it was being allowed. He received a series of dispiriting responses, arguing that ratio setting for students in specialized fields was “for the good of the country.”

  Over the course of various communiqués, the MOE explained that it was necessary to control the gender ratio in certain fields; namely those involving national protection and public safety or in which there’s a high element of secrecy or confidentiality and the environment may be deemed “dangerous” for women. They explain that it is necessary to “protect” women by limiting their numbers in fields where they may come to harm, or in fields where educational resources are limited and where society needs a certain level of balance. Without this balance, the MOE argues, the “quality of education and its benefit to society” will be affected. Their responses also hinted that an imbalance might “affect the needs of related ministries,” which I was particularly curious to know more about.

  “Basically, they’re saying that since employers prefer males for certain fields, it’s necessary to make sure male enrollment remains high, so employers can be guaranteed a large enough pool of the right gender to choose from,” says Lu. “They don’t seem to understand that education should meet the needs and expectations of the individual,” he adds, arguing that it’s not the government’s job to try to control who should work in a particular field. “Deciding whether or not someone is suitable for a job is the responsibility of individuals and of HR departments, not the government,” said Lu.

  Maizi Li, co-founder of the Gender Equality Advocacy and Action Network, a Chinese NGO, agrees. Small and fiery with a pixie cut, Li joined a group of a dozen other women who shaved their heads in protest of the discriminatory gaokao scores. A relentless activist, she has raised awareness for everything from China’s lack of female toilets—the first time I met her, she gave me a rather slick-looking disposable paper airplane–like device that allows a woman to pee standing up—to domestic violence.

  In March of 2015 she rose to international prominence after being detained and eventually imprisoned following a demonstration that she helped organize across several Chinese cities on International Women’s Day. Although she and her fellow activists were simply putting stickers on subway cars to draw attention to China’s lack of redress for victims of sexual abuse and assault, she and at least nine other women were brought into custody. Five women, including Maizi, were charged with the crime of “picking quarrels and causing trouble”—a common catch-all for locking up dissidents—and remained in jail for a total of thirty-eight days. Their case drew an outpouring of support from women around the world, including Hillary Clinto
n and the former US ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power. The story of “The Feminist Five,” as they came to be known, was covered widely by the international press.

  Since Maizi’s release, she has slightly scaled down her activism. Failing to do so would swiftly get her into trouble with the authorities, who still monitor her actions, though they haven’t been able to stop her from having her finger on the pulse of gender inequality in China.

  I ask Maizi why the fields chosen for test-score discrimination seem so random, because I can’t quite work out the link between more women in broadcast journalism and a threat to national security, for instance. She sighs. “It’s impossible to know the true motivations, but I’ll tell you what I suspect,” she says.

  She explains that if it weren’t more difficult for girls to enter communications programs than boys, the latter would largely be outnumbered. This is problematic because in China, “one man and one woman means gender equality,” she says. If the majority of program hosts on CCTV were female, this wouldn’t reflect “equality.” If “balance” is so important, what about policies favoring females in fields where women are by far the minority, I ask. She smiles and teaches me a new expression: qian guize, which translates literally as “closet rules,” but is best interpreted as “unspoken rules.”

  “The funding of certain schools depends on their being able to show that they’ve employed a certain number of graduates every year,” she explains. “And since males generally have better prospects in the job market, universities want to make sure they have enough of them.”

  This information throws me for a loop, so I begin to ask around. A source at Renmin University—one of the schools that, as of 2012, had been engaging in the practice of requiring female applicants to have higher gaokao scores than males for certain disciplines—tells me that of the students studying to be HR managers in the university’s highly reputed program, the majority are women, and yet the only ones who seem to have jobs lined up before graduation are males. Another source, a foreign visiting professor in the literature department at Beijing Normal Capital University, tells me that he is bewildered by his department’s choice of a new dean. The department is dominated by female staff, but the newly appointed dean is male—a man not even thirty, who, unlike most of his female colleagues, has not even finished his PhD. “I was very surprised by the choice,” said my source, “and by the fact that none of the women seemed to oppose it.”

  After speaking with a female professor at one of Beijing’s top universities, I learned that male students are generally expected to achieve more after graduation. By this logic, most admissions officers reason that the greater the population of male students, the greater the chances that the university will have a star alumnus in the future. The professor is quick to clarify, however, that the university as a whole actually suffers from a shortage of female applicants, given its focus on technology and the fact that fewer women choose to earn degrees in scientific disciplines. Nonetheless, no special effort has been made to recruit more female students. On the contrary, in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures where she works, there are generally three to five boys in a class of thirty students. “I once heard a professor at my department meeting say exactly this: ‘The severe lack of male students in our department is a big problem. Boys are more likely to become experts in their fields of study in the future, and they have more potential.’”

  Before harping for too long about just how terribly unfair things are in China, it might be worth taking a look at the state of college admissions in the United States.

  In 2006, a New York Times op-ed written by a Kenyon College admissions officer, Jennifer Delahunty Britz, openly admitted that Kenyon often gave preferential treatment to male applicants by making it easier for them to gain admission, despite lower scores. In response to her piece, other admissions officers echoed that such preferences were not uncommon, though many seemed to be surprised at the candor with which she spoke of them. Columbia University law professor Ted Shaw referred to the “help” male students get as an “open secret”—something that everyone in the admissions world was well aware of, but not necessarily something that the outside world needed to know.

  In response to the media attention and discussion that Britz’s story generated, in September 2009, the US Commission on Civil Rights voted to conduct an investigation of several colleges and universities in the mid-Atlantic states, evaluating for instances of gender discrimination in the admissions process. A study was devised by the late Dr. Robert Lerner, head of the Commission’s Office for Civil Rights Evaluation and Research, and over the course of an eighteen-month-long investigation, data was collected from a diverse sample of fifteen colleges and universities.

  However, just as the results of the investigation were coming together, three new members of the commission were appointed, two by President Obama and one by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Two of the investigation’s original supporters, appointed by President Bush (as well as a member appointed by Reid who had not voted when the investigation was first undertaken) rotated off. In March 2011, a majority of members of the newly reconstituted commission voted to terminate the investigation, though none of the remaining original supporters changed his or her vote. Mostly, those who voted to terminate claimed that shortcomings in data and the limited geographic scope of the project made the study inadequate, but Gail Heriot, a professor of law at the University of San Diego and one of the eight members of the US Civil Rights Commission, suspects there was more to it.

  She attributes the shutting down of the investigation possibly being due to political interests, and also brings up a curious point. She cites a column written on the matter, in which the following statistic appears: “For every 100 women who earn a college degree (in the US), only 73 men do.” Heriot points out that the author of the column refers to the situation as a “boy crisis,” flatly dismissing any possibility of discrimination against female students.

  Yet as we’ve seen in China, these things may be one and the same. Women can be discriminated against in college admissions and men can be falling behind women in terms of scholastic performance. The former, in fact, seems to be a likely response to the latter. I’ll leave the policy ethicists to debate whether or not allowing for this type of “discrimination” is flagrantly unconstitutional, or unfair but somehow justified. Instead, I turn to how those degrees that women need in order to stay afloat professionally appear to be detrimental to their marriage prospects when they get beyond a certain age.

  Throughout the twentieth century, white college-educated adults of both sexes in the United States were less likely than their less educated counterparts to be married by age thirty. This was especially true for young college-educated women, who until 1990, got married at much lower rates than their less educated peers. This disparity in marriage rates resulting from education is often referred to by demographers as a “marriage gap,” something that, according to a Pew Research Center report, is on the wane. “Among white women under 40, the educational marriage gap has vanished,” reads the report, which clearly indicates that as of 2008, 84 percent of college-educated, white thirty-five- to thirty-nine-year-old women had married, matching the rate of white women of the same age without a degree. That same report also predicts that college-educated American women will soon become the majority of married white women.

  To compare this information and evaluate its validity in respect to China, it’s important to look at a few more numbers. As reported by Barbara Dafoe Whitehead in Why There Are No Good Men Left, in 1960, only 185,000, or 1.6 percent, of college-educated American women between age twenty-five and thirty-four in the United States were unmarried. Today, there are 2.5 million of them, or 28 percent of women between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four. It’s also critical to keep in mind that whereas Chinese women have been the dominant gender of college degree earners as of 2011, American women have represented the majority of higher degree earners since 1982. In
other words, it has taken over thirty years for well-educated American women to close the marriage gap. Will Chinese women succeed in doing the same?

  Smoke and Mirrors

  After filing her resignation, June decided it would be a good idea to take some time off to travel and think about whether she’d like to take another job in law or go back to school for a degree in art history. This decision was completely flummoxing to her mother, who didn’t fully understand why she left her job in the first place. Nonetheless, to catch up and celebrate her victory over her tyrannical former boss, we meet for dinner and are joined by Ivy, who arrives at the restaurant resplendent as usual.

  When the three of us need to communicate, we use Weixin, or WeChat. A cross between Facebook, Twitter, Skype, WhatsApp, and Instagram, WeChat is a convenient way to chat with contacts and follow their lives through a microblog-like feed of “moments” in which users can post pictures, text, links, and other random musings peppered with a magical selection of emojis. I use WeChat daily—it’s essentially become my go-to texting app—but I had no idea that it was a key weapon in Ivy’s man arsenal.

  “You need to post pictures of expensive things,” she explains to June. “So the men following you understand that you have exquisite taste.”