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China’s leadership is moving further away from its promises, despite Xi [Jinping]’s claims of ostensible progress, asserting that Chinese women are now “participating in the entire process of national and social governance with unprecedented confidence and vigor,” and positioning them as “protagonists.” The clearest testament to this regression lies in Xi’s addresses to the All-China Women’s Federation (ACWF) – the official state women’s organization under the Communist Party – in 2013, 2018, and 2023. Across these speeches, Xi consistently advanced patriarchal narratives that cast women primarily as caretakers and moral anchors within the family. Yet his 2023 address marked a further step, urging the cultivation of “a new type of marriage and parenting culture” and the promotion of childbirth, effectively marginalizing women’s professional work and silencing their agency beyond domestic and reproductive roles.

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Women in STEM are celebrated as symbols of national progress [in China], yet this recognition often amounts to ideological instrumentalization. They are valued primarily as a labor force to drive national development goals and to project an image of modernity, progress, and national strength, rather than as fully empowered agents in their own right. Simultaneously, this exists in stark tension with the state’s enduring patriarchal and pro-natalist policies, driven by demographic concerns, which continue to frame women primarily as reproducers and custodians of family life.

This paradox is also exposed by the data which reveals that beneath the state’s celebration of women’s purported achievements in science and technology lies a persistent pattern of underrepresentation, pay disparities, and barriers that limit advancement. Official figures show that nearly 40 million women are employed in science and technology, making up 45.8 percent of China’s STEM workforce. Yet fewer than three million work in research and development.

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In 2022–23, women accounted for 63 percent of all new university entrants, but in elite institutions and STEM-focused majors, male dominance quickly reasserts itself. At the prestigious C9 universities (China’s top tier), female undergraduates make up only 37.7 percent, well below the national average. Disciplinary divides are even starker: physics departments in some universities record male-to-female ratios of 19:1, while women comprise only 25–30 percent of students in computer science and electronic engineering.

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Women also face systemic disadvantages in funding and visibility. They are underrepresented on peer review panels and high-level selection committees, reducing their chances of securing grants. Although women make up roughly half of university instructors, they occupy only one-third of master’s advisor roles and fewer than 17 percent of doctoral advisor positions. Pay disparities are substantial: across sectors and education levels, women earn on average only 71.6 percent of what men do. In high-prestige publishing, the imbalance is also stark: in 2023, only five of 101 corresponding authors with Chinese affiliations in “Nature” were women, highlighting their scarcity in global scientific leadership.

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Yet the challenges women face in STEM are not isolated – they reflect a longer history of gendered constraints and feminist activism in China. As early as the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Western feminism, rooted in liberal ideals of individual rights and autonomy, sought to affirm women as rational citizens entitled to legal and political recognition. Chinese feminism, by contrast, emerged in the context of national modernization and liberation from feudalism and imperialism. Following 1949, Mao Zedong’s famous dictum that “women hold up half the sky” reframed empowerment as a collective contribution to socialist nation-building rather than a pursuit of individual rights.

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