The Varying Display of “Gender Display”:

A Comparative Study of Mainland China and Taiwan

by
Yu, Jia

Abstract:

In the literature on household work, “gender display” refers to the hypothesis that women
who outearn their husbands tend to do more household work than women whose earnings
are similar to their husbands’. Past research on whether or not this hypothesis is true has
been based mainly on data for western societies, which are relatively stable. However, the
extent to which gender display is found to be true may depend on social context, as ender
relations are affected by societal changes. Capitalizing on comparisons of contemporary
Mainland China and Taiwan, this study reexamines the gender display hypothesis in erms
of varying social contexts.

For this study, we analyze data from a recent household survey with comparable
instruments in Mainland China and Taiwan. We consider how the effects of wives’
contributions to family income on their housework time vary across Taiwan, rural
Mainland China, and urban Mainland China. We estimate a series of regression models
containing as a predictor the quadratic form of wife’s contribution to family income to
test whether or not gender display exists.

Our preliminary results show that (1) gender display exists in rural Mainland China and
Taiwan, but not in urban Mainland China, and (2) gender display is significantly more
severe in Taiwan than in rural Mainland China. These results reveal that gender display is
context-specific, and these contextual variations are consistent with what we know about
social changes in these two Chinese societies: the Communist Revolution has disrupted
traditional forms of gender relations in Mainland China, especially in urban areas,
whereas in Taiwan, despite a much higher level of economic development, the traditional
gender norms remain intact.

Key Word: housework, gender display, social changes