or 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 same time, China as a whole has not obtained the full benefit of the human capital embodied in its rural women.
The rural woman who moves to a city to work as a housemaid contributes less to China's economic and social progress than she would if trained as a driver or skilled factory worker, let alone a teacher or engineer. The rural woman who remains in the countryside and finds work as a local factory worker gains less, and contributes less, than if her work were paid equally to that of her male coworkers.
This critique should not be taken as a means to dismiss the enormous progress that China has already made. Rural women, like practically all other Chinese, have vastly greater options and opportunities available to them today than they did even two decades ago, let alone half a century ago. They live far better, in a country where...