Leverhulme Visiting Professor Public Lecture

The continued feminization of both paid and unpaid care work has been regarded as a major obstacle to achieving gender equality. Western scholarship on gender and care has focused on the impact of policies and work arrangements on men’s evolving involvement in care, with limited attention to how migration, a major phenomenon in a globalized world, has affected men’s familial caregiving. Drawing on ethnographic research and in-depth interviews with 240 rural-to-urban migrants in South China, Prof. Choi illustrates in this presentation how migration has altered the patriarchal family structure and men’s roles in familial care in post-socialist China. Official data indicate that there were 295 million rural-to-urban migrants in China in 2021, 63% of whom were male. The findings reveal that migration has substantially transformed the patriarchal Chinese family and notions of masculinity. Specifically, married migrant men with children in urban areas have significantly increased their participation in domestic and childcare responsibilities, thus redefining traditional ideals of manhood. However, this increased involvement in familial care cannot be simplistically interpreted as a sign of advancing gender equality, as their caregiving practices remain grounded in discourses of masculinity. Consequently, while migrant men make ‘masculine compromises’ to bridge the care gap created by migration, the gender equality gains from these compromises may be temporary and could potentially revert to more traditional and conservative gender dynamics once the conditions compelling men to compromise no longer exist.

Susanne Yuk Ping Choi is Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professor at Oxford School of Global and Area Studies, and Professor of Sociology/Co-Director of the Gender Research Centre at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include migration, gender, family, and sexuality. Her book Masculine Compromise: Migration, Family and Gender in China received the Best Book Award of the International Sociological Association’s Sociology of Migration Section (RC31).