as household workers.
At the same time, factories have sprung up in many rural districts. These factories have broadly the same fundamental economic impact on the countryside as does economic growth in the urban areas. They have this impact, however, without the pressure to migrate with its various disruptive effects on individuals and families, the rural communities they leave, and the cities to which they migrate.
Rural factories most obviously offer an employment alternative to agricultural labor. For women, whose opportunities for earning wages even as agricultural workers tended to be limited, factory jobs also offer an alternative to paid or unpaid household work. Factories generally offer higher wages than these traditional alternatives. Moreover, by their presence they tend to bid up wages in general.
Thus, both for rural China as a whole and for rural Chinese women, the overall effects of rural factories and economic development in the Chinese countryside has been strongly positive. However, these benefits have been unevenly distributed. Wages for male workers in rural factories tend to be higher than for female workers. The possible causes of this disparity will be examined below.
A similar story can be told of the influence of urban economic growth and resulting job opportunities for rural Chinese women. On the one hand, the overall impact is clearly beneficial, offering wider opportunities than were ever available to rural Chinese women before, and at better wages. At the same time, however, the range of these opportunities is narrower than it might be as was noted previously, many rural women who migrate to the cities find work only as housemaids.
For China's rural women, thus, economic transformation in China has been a blessing incompletely realized. Their opportunities, though wider than before, remain limited. Their wages, though higher than before, remain low. At the sam...