Article for Summary Presentation 7分析和总结分析和总结.docx

Article for Summary Presentation 7 China’s Entrenched Gender Gap Leta Hong Fincher | May 20, 2013 | The New York Times BEIJING — Lately, a stream of rosy media accounts has been telling the world to look to China as a model of gender equality in the work place. “China Dominates List of Female Billionaires” and “Women in China: the Sky’s the Limit” are some recent examples from the international press. But the cascade of optimistic portraits detracts from what is really happening to women in China’s fast-growing urban work force. They are losing ground fast. The 2010 census put the percentage of working-age women in the work force at 74. The figure stacks up well against other countries such as the United States and Australia, where about 75 percent of working-age women were employed in 2010. In Sweden, the female labor force participation for 2010 was 87.5 percent; France, 84 percent; Britain, 79 percent. But China’s figure is high because it includes women working in the countryside, and unlike developed countries, nearly half of China’s population is still rural. The picture for urban women is very different. China’s urban employment rate for working -age women fell to a new low of 60.8 percent in 2010, down from 77.4 percent 20 years earlier, according to census figures. The 2010 rate was 20.3 percentage points lower than that of men. This troubling trend matters because the effort to move people from the countryside to the cities is a top policy priority of China’s new leaders — one that they see as crucial to boosting economic growth. China’s urbanization rate is expected to rise to 53.37 percent this year, and Chinese state media say that 60 percent of China’s population of nearly 1.4 billion will likely be urban by 2020. Yet the presumed economic benefits of urbanization cannot be realized if the talents of half the country’s population — women — are squandered in the process. The decline in urban women’s labor participation looks even worse if you go