School leadership,female empowerment and China’s Rise

Introduction

The fifth goal of the UN’s 2030 Sustainable Development Goals is gender equality and empowerment for all women and girls. If the participants in our research project about Chinese school leadership and role modelling gender equality are to be believed, then China is well along the path to attaining those goals. This matters because China is the largest education system in the world, females are a growing majority in China’s overall student population and they continue to make impressive advances in all aspects of their schooling (Cunningham et al., 2020; OECD, 2018).

In Communist China educational leaders are influential, highly regarded and they must be loyal party members (Burns and Xiaqi, 2010; White, 1981). This article presents data from 126 of these Chinese school leaders who are shaping the current generation of Chinese children’s attitudes towards gender equality and female empowerment.

The theoretical underpinning of our research assume school leaders are role models whose beliefs about gender equality affect their students understanding of gender norms (e.g. Faulstich-Wieland, 2013; Martino, 2009; Olsson and Martiny, 2018). This academic theory incongruously aligns with the political philosophy of Xi Jinping which asserts both that school leaders are patriotic role models and gender equality is a worthy ambition in China’s Rise (Xi, 2018).

A brief history of female empowerment and Chinese education

For most of China’s millenniums of history, education has been the preserve of men. At the end of the 19th Century less than 10% of women in China were literate (Lee, 2014). In the 1950s Mao’s Chinese Communist Party (CCP) outlawed many gender discriminatory practices, created co-educational schools and declared that men and women should be considered equal comrades in their new vision for society (Ip, 2003; Karl, 2013).

After Mao died, Deng Xiaoping continued to expand gender equality laws in China and signed onto international covenants espousing similar goals (Attané, 2012). Nevertheless, female empowerment gains were slow, especially in rural and remote areas of China (Brown and Park, 2002; Hannum, 2003, 2005; Hannum et al., 2009, 2010; Song et al., 2006). Deng’s era may be most (in)famously remembered for its One Child Policy which led to disturbing breaches of rights for women but also allowed for them to delay motherhood and as a result increase their educational attainments (Dong, 2014; Guenfoud, 2017).

Today official reports and media coverage are favourable of China’s successes in increasing female empowerment and gender equality (e.g. State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China, 2019). Still, Xi’s speeches and actions are hyper-masculinised; expressing an overt vision for a gender binary society of working fathers and virtuous mothers (Rauhala, 2018). However, feminist scholars and Chinese dissidents see continued gender discrimination in all aspects of mainland Chinese society (Golley, 2018; Hong-Fincher, 2018; Zheng, 2020) and criticise gender equality lessons in schools for promoting a separate but equal ideal (Chen et al., 2019; Chen and Rao, 2010; Song et al., 2017; Swan, 2017; Yang and Cao, 2019; Yang and McNair, 2019).

Conducting research in Communist China

Our research team included Mandarin and English-speaking researchers who are critical education theorists (e.g. Gur-Ze'ev, 2005; Smyth et al., 2014). Unfortunately, our mainland Chinese colleagues, working under Xi’s instructions against working with ‘foreign ideas’ (Levin, 2015; Svensson and Pils, 2019), are necessarily ghost authors. Our study was designed mindful of the importance of cultural sensitivity (Cohen et al., 2018) and Smith et al. (2008) warnings about the challenges of collecting and analysing data from China. Our research was the culmination of 3 years of pilot testing and cross-cultural interpretations for the best wording in Mandarin and English to put into the final survey instrument.

The Survey says…

Our WeChat© delivered survey to 126 Chinese school leaders revealed that more than 90% of our participants believe they are leading schools where gender equality is endorsed and celebrated. 93% believe that boys and girls in China are treated equally by their teachers and 87% agreed that in Chinese workplaces men and women are treated equally.

Our key findings are possibly optimistic because recent research publications have found female power and status in Chinese educational leadership positions is growing (Yu and Wang, 2018; Zhao and Jones, 2017) whilst women in other fields still only hold a tiny number of leadership roles. Still, our research data shows our participant Chinese educators retain the inimitable view that men and women can be both different and equal at the same time: with 93% believing some jobs are better suited to one gender; 69% agreeing men are better leaders than women; and 54% thinking men make better mathematicians and scientists.

Open ended comments at the survey’s end summarise our findings that participant Chinese women school leaders are good girls of power and privilege who lead schools where ‘females and males are basically equal, and no special measures are needed to promote gender equality. Students have equal opportunities in exams, event competitions, and cadre competitions. They see me and know women can lead’. These rosy views of individual success and achievement are role modelling to current and future generations of Chinese boys and girls to expect ‘gender equality with Chinese characteristics’. Combine these beliefs with the fact that female empowerment may be growing unstoppably in China due to sheer weight of numbers and it looks certain that Chinese women will be very influential as China continues to Rise.