Marketization Interwined with Cultural Transition: Explaining the Widening Gender Wage Gap in Post-Socialist Urban China

The pattern of exacerbating gender earnings inequality during the economic transition is shared by post-socialist countries in Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, and China. Among these, China has witnessed massive growth in individual earnings in urban areas since the 2000s, resulting in exceptionally high opportunity costs for female workers. The dominant explanation at macro level is the marketization theory, however, the operationalization of marketization from previous studies essentially only capture the dimension of privatization. This simplification is costly and it leaves significant logical gaps in the mechanisms that scholars usually refer to. This study aims to shed light on the issue by conceptually and empirically differentiate three dimensions of marketization that are equally relevant to the dynamics of the gender wage gap. Namely, the capital dimension (privatization), the labor dimension (the development of an integrated labor market), and the cultural dimension (the fall of doctrinal egalitarianism and the rise of the greedy work). Drawing on the Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS) 2005-2018, the Chinese Household Income Project (CHIP) 2003-2018, and the one-percent population mini-census of China in 2005, this study aims at teasing out different mechanisms clearly, which could better inform the policy.