Young Women’s Employment in China: Trends, Challenges, and Policy Responses

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-440-2_63How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Female Youth Employment; Gender Inequality; Occupational Segregation; Labor Market Policy

Abstract

This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the employment landscape for young women in China, examining trends from 2000 to 2020, identifying persistent challenges, and proposing targeted policy interventions. Despite significant educational advancements—evidenced by the proportion of young women with bachelor’s degrees rising from under 5% in 2000 to approximately 20% in 2020—the employment scale has notably declined, particularly among those aged 16-19, dropping from over 2 million to under 500,000. Employment quality has improved, with a shift towards commercial service and professional roles, yet unemployment rates have escalated since 2020, reaching 14% for women aged 15-24 by 2023, and peaking at 17.1% for the 16-24 age group (excluding students) in urban areas by July 2024. Occupational gender segregation has worsened, reflecting deepening gender inequality in the labor market. Key challenges include intensified employment pressure on female college graduates, the prevalent “slow employment” phenomenon, implicit gender discrimination, a lack of digital skills, and difficulties in achieving work-life balance. To address these issues, the paper recommends a multifaceted policy framework: stimulating job creation in female-dominated sectors, abolishing the two-year retention of graduate status to curb delayed employment, reducing disparities in employment security between public and private sectors, combating implicit gender biases, aligning educational curricula with market demands, enhancing STEM education for women, supporting female entrepreneurship, and improving work-life balance through expanded childcare services and flexible work arrangements.

Copyright

© 2025 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Xinyu Cai
AU  - Lin Zhang
AU  - Xiaoxue Chen
AU  - Mengdie Wang
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/07/10
TI  - Young Women’s Employment in China: Trends, Challenges, and Policy Responses
BT  - Proceedings of the 2025 11th International Conference on Humanities and Social Science Research（ICHSSR 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 547
EP  - 568
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-440-2_63
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-440-2_63
ID  - Cai2025
ER  -