Female Labor Force Participation in Urban and Rural China1

Female labor force participation and its determinants in rural and urban China were examined. The sociological literature has demonstrated that participation tends to increase in urban and industrialized areas where women have higher levels of educations and fewer children where more workers are engaged in service professions and where family structure is less traditional. With the use of data on counties and cities (n=2377) from the 1% sample of the 1982 census of the Peoples Republic of China it was found that female labor force participation is likely to rise in areas with increased agricultural employment educational levels proportion of female-headed households and higher male-to-female sex ratios. Both the size of the service sector and the fertility rate had negligible effects on female labor force participation. Although on the average rural areas have slightly higher levels of female labor force participation urban areas actually have a higher rate of female participation when other variables are controlled. In addition the findings suggest that market factors such as education are more likely to determine the rate of female labor force participation in urban areas; in rural areas a more significant role is played by demographic and social factors such as sex ratio and household structure. (authors modified)