Power and status in public and private spheres : gender, workplace authority, and family dynamics in China

Progress toward gender equality remains uneven across the public and private spheres.Connecting these spheres is essential for charting a fuller gender revolution. Situated in the Chinese context, my dissertation centres on workplace authority—the legitimate power to supervise and influence others—and examines how it intersects with gender and family dynamics in married different-sex couples. My first empirical chapter draws on seven waves of longitudinal data (2010–2022) from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) to assess gender and parenthood inequalities in access to and scope of workplace authority. Results from fixed-effects linear probability and hybrid negative binomial models show that overall, women’s likelihood and scope of supervisory authority decrease following parenthood, especially after having two or more children, while men experience no significant changes. By work sector, a considerable motherhood penalty is concentrated in the private sector, whereas a fatherhood premium exists solely in the state sector. The second empirical chapter analyzes the CFPS data to examine how couples’ workplace authority configuration shapes their division of housework. Fixed-effects estimates demonstrate that when wives attain authority but husbands not, husbands increase housework participation and thereby reduce wives’ share of housework. The third empirical chapter uses cross-sectional data from the Chinese General Social Survey (2017–2023) to examine how personal and spousal workplace authority are associated with individual well-being, focusing on variation by gender and gender ideology. Results from logistic regression models show that among individuals with egalitarian rather than traditional gender beliefs, women’s happiness is less contingent on their husbands’ authority, whereas men’s well-being benefits more from their wives’ authority. Taken together, these findings foreground workplace authority as a crucial mechanism linking work and family domains that reshapes gender inequality. Disparities disadvantaging mothers in authority, a core workplace resource, can perpetuate gender and parenthood inequalities in work conditions and organizational policies. However, women’s attainment of workplace authority can extend into family life, advancing gender equality in the division of domestic labour and supporting well-being for both men and women.