Breaking Barriers or Filling Low‐Paid Positions? Gendered Narratives of Women Village Cadres in Rural China

Although rural women have long played essential roles in sustaining village communities in China, these contributions have rarely translated into greater formal participation in local governance. Existing knowledge has covered the barriers that limit women's access to leadership positions in rural communities. Far less is known about those women who, despite these barriers, managed to become village leaders. Understanding the opportunities, enablers, and pathways that allow women to become village leaders is important for advancing women's representation in local governance. This paper studies how rural women became village cadres in rural China. It employs a qualitative approach, utilizing semi‐structured interviews with ten women cadres in three villages in Sichuan, Jiangxi, and Yunnan provinces. Using Bronfenbrenner's Bioecological Model, which emphasizes interactions across multiple contextual levels over time as an analytical framework, this study reveals that the increasing administrative and service‐oriented focus of China's rural governance has opened opportunities for women's participation while reinforcing traditional gender roles by assigning women only certain positions. Women village cadres' success is shaped by their constant interactions with multiple system contexts over time, including support from family members, clan ties, township officials, and men's withdrawal from village cadre positions. The findings suggest that increasing rural women's formal participation requires a fair, women‐inclusive governmental structure.