IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/pal/palcom/v8y2021i1d10.1057_s41599-021-00799-6.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Occupational gender segregation and gendered language in a language without gender: trends, variations, implications for social development in China

Author

Listed:
  • Qi Su

    (Peking University)

  • Pengyuan Liu

    (Beijing Language and Culture University)

  • Wei Wei

    (Peking University)

  • Shucheng Zhu

    (Beijing Language and Culture University)

  • Chu-Ren Huang

    (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University)

Abstract

This paper proposes a textual analytics approach to the discovery of trends and variations in social development. Specifically, we have designed a linguistic index that measures the marked usage of gendered modifiers in the Chinese language; this predicts the degree of occupational gender segregation by identifying the unbalanced distribution of males and females across occupations. The effectiveness of the linguistic index in modelling occupational gender segregation was confirmed through survey responses from 244 participants, covering 63 occupations listed in the Holland Occupational Codes. The index was then applied to explore the trends and variations of gender equality in occupation, drawing on an extensive digital collection of materials published by the largest newspaper group in China for both longitudinal (from 1946 to 2018) and synchronic (from 31 provincial-level administrative divisions) data. This quantitative study shows that (1) the use of gendered language has weakened over time, indicating a decline in occupational gender stereotyping; (2) conservative genres have shown higher degrees of gendered language use; (3) culturally conservative, demographically stable, or geographically remote regions have higher degrees of gendered language use. These findings are discussed with consideration of historical, cultural, social, psychological, and geographical factors. While the existing literature on gendered language has been an important and useful tool for reading a text in the context of digital humanities, an innovative textual analytics approach, as shown in this paper, can prove to be a crucial indicator of historical trends and variations in social development.

Suggested Citation

  • Qi Su & Pengyuan Liu & Wei Wei & Shucheng Zhu & Chu-Ren Huang, 2021. "Occupational gender segregation and gendered language in a language without gender: trends, variations, implications for social development in China," Palgrave Communications, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 8(1), pages 1-10, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:palcom:v:8:y:2021:i:1:d:10.1057_s41599-021-00799-6
    DOI: 10.1057/s41599-021-00799-6
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://link.springer.com/10.1057/s41599-021-00799-6
    File Function: Abstract
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1057/s41599-021-00799-6?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Martin Watts, 1995. "Divergent Trends in Gender Segregation by Occupation in the United States: 1970-92," Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, M.E. Sharpe, Inc., vol. 17(3), pages 357-379, April.
    2. Michael Baker & Kirsten Cornelson, 2018. "Gender-Based Occupational Segregation and Sex Differences in Sensory, Motor, and Spatial Aptitudes," Demography, Springer;Population Association of America (PAA), vol. 55(5), pages 1749-1775, October.
    3. Martin Watts, 1995. "Divergent Trends in Gender Segregation by Occupation in the United States: 1970–92," Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 17(3), pages 357-378, March.
    4. Seán Roberts & James Winters, 2013. "Linguistic Diversity and Traffic Accidents: Lessons from Statistical Studies of Cultural Traits," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 8(8), pages 1-13, August.
    5. Catherine Verniers & Jorge Vala, 2018. "Justifying gender discrimination in the workplace: The mediating role of motherhood myths," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 13(1), pages 1-23, January.
    6. Andrea Cutillo & Marco Centra, 2017. "Gender-Based Occupational Choices and Family Responsibilities: The Gender Wage Gap in Italy," Feminist Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 23(4), pages 1-31, October.
    7. Martin Watts, 1998. "Occupational gender segregation: Index measureiient and econometric modeling," Demography, Springer;Population Association of America (PAA), vol. 35(4), pages 489-496, November.
    8. Preston, Jo Anne, 1999. "Occupational gender segregation Trends and explanations," The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 39(5), pages 611-624.
    9. Longxing Li & Chu-Ren Huang & Vincent Xian Wang, 2020. "Lexical Competition and Change: A Corpus-Assisted Investigation of Gambling and Gaming in the Past Centuries," SAGE Open, , vol. 10(3), pages 21582440209, September.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Renkui Hou & Chu-Ren Huang & Kathleen Ahrens, 2022. "Regional varieties and diachronic changes in Chinese political discourse," Palgrave Communications, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 9(1), pages 1-18, December.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Riccardo Leoncini & Mariele Macaluso & Annalivia Polselli, 2023. "Gender Segregation: Analysis across Sectoral-Dominance in the UK Labour Market," Papers 2303.04539, arXiv.org, revised Dec 2023.
    2. Riccardo Leoncini & Mariele Macaluso & Annalivia Polselli, 2024. "Gender segregation: analysis across sectoral dominance in the UK labour market," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 67(5), pages 2289-2343, November.
    3. Stephan Humpert, 2014. "Occupational Sex Segregation and Working Time: Regional Evidence from Germany," Panoeconomicus, Savez ekonomista Vojvodine, Novi Sad, Serbia, vol. 61(3), pages 317-329, June.
    4. Thomas DeLeire & Helen Levy, 2001. "Gender, Occupation Choice and the Risk of Death at Work," NBER Working Papers 8574, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    5. Chu-Ren Huang & Sicong Dong & Yike Yang & He Ren, 2021. "From language to meteorology: kinesis in weather events and weather verbs across Sinitic languages," Palgrave Communications, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 8(1), pages 1-13, December.
    6. Tugce, Cuhadaroglu, 2013. "My Group Beats Your Group: Evaluating Non-Income Inequalities," SIRE Discussion Papers 2013-49, Scottish Institute for Research in Economics (SIRE).
    7. Stephan HUMPERT, 2015. "Gender-based Segregation before and after the Great Recession," Theoretical and Applied Economics, Asociatia Generala a Economistilor din Romania / Editura Economica, vol. 0(4(605), W), pages 53-62, Winter.
    8. Bozena Wielgoszewska & Alex Bryson & Monica Costa-Dias & Francesca Foliano & Heather Joshi & David Wilkinson, 2021. "Exploring the Reasons for Labour Market Gender Inequality a Year into the Covid-19 Pandemic: Evidence from the UK Cohort Studies," DoQSS Working Papers 21-23, Quantitative Social Science - UCL Social Research Institute, University College London.
    9. Coral del Río & Olga Alonso-Villar, 2008. "Occupational and industrial segregation of female and male workers in Spain: An alternative approach," Working Papers 84, ECINEQ, Society for the Study of Economic Inequality.
    10. Raquel Vale Mendes, 2009. "Gender wage differentials and occupational distribution," Notas Económicas, Faculty of Economics, University of Coimbra, issue 29, pages 26-40, June.
    11. Casey J. Dawkins, 2004. "Measuring the Spatial Pattern of Residential Segregation," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 41(4), pages 833-851, April.
    12. Alexandra Strassmann & Marco Kaufmann & Holger Dressel & Alexander Turk & Martin Röösli & Kees Hoogh & Steven S. Sadhra & Matthias Bopp & Milo A. Puhan, 2020. "Occupational exposure and the risk of airway obstruction and mortality," International Journal of Public Health, Springer;Swiss School of Public Health (SSPH+), vol. 65(6), pages 823-833, July.
    13. Shulamit Kahn & Donna Ginther, 2017. "Women and STEM," NBER Working Papers 23525, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    14. Pham, Tho & Talavera, Oleksandr & Wu, Zhuangchen, 2023. "Labor markets during war time: Evidence from online job advertisements," Journal of Comparative Economics, Elsevier, vol. 51(4), pages 1316-1333.
    15. Iris Jerby & Moshe Semyonov & Noah Lewin-Epstein, 2005. "Capturing Gender-Based Microsegregation," Sociological Methods & Research, , vol. 34(1), pages 122-136, August.
    16. Sarkar, Sudipa & Sahoo, Soham & Klasen, Stephan, 2019. "Employment transitions of women in India: A panel analysis," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 115(C), pages 291-309.
    17. Huang, Yana & Wang, Tianyu, 2022. "MULAN in the name: Causes and consequences of gendered Chinese names," China Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 75(C).
    18. Jorge Chica‐Olmo & Marina Checa‐Olivas, 2021. "Spatial impact of factors influencing the achievement of the Europa2020 employment targets," Papers in Regional Science, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 100(3), pages 633-649, June.
    19. Jan Gromadzki, 2019. "Trends in occupational segregation by gender in a post-communist country," IBS Working Papers 09/2019, Instytut Badan Strukturalnych.
    20. Branko Milanovic & Paola Salardi, 2016. "The Evolution of Gender and Racial Occupational Segregation Across Formal and Non-Formal Labor Markets in Brazil, 1987 to 2006," Review of Income and Wealth, International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, vol. 62, pages 68-89, August.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:palcom:v:8:y:2021:i:1:d:10.1057_s41599-021-00799-6. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.nature.com/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.