Breaking the Motherhood Penalty: A Study on Coping Strategies of Chinese Career Women Based on Structuration Theory

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-577-5_51How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Motherhood Penalty; Career Women; Structuration Theory

Abstract

Despite significant improvements in women’s educational attainment and labor market participation worldwide, the motherhood penalty—manifested in wage loss, career stagnation, and identity devaluation—remains persistent.

Existing research has primarily documented the structural existence and magnitude of this penalty while paying limited attention to the subjective agency of working women and the concrete strategies they employ to mitigate its effects.

Addressing this gap, this study investigates how working mothers actively cope with the motherhood penalty through family collaboration, workplace negotiation, and adaptive care arrangements. Employing a mixed-methods research design, the study integrates questionnaire data from Chinese career mothers aged 25–55 with in-depth interviews that explore underlying motivations, decision-making processes, and contextual constraints. The quantitative findings reveal distinct patterns in strategy adoption across occupational sectors and family structures, while qualitative evidence elucidates the practical logic through which women mobilize family resources and renegotiate professional identities under institutional and cultural pressures. By foregrounding women’s subjective initiative and everyday practices, this study extends existing motherhood penalty research beyond outcome measurement toward process-oriented explanation.

The findings contribute to feminist labor studies by reconceptualizing working mothers not merely as passive recipients of structural disadvantage, but as active agents navigating and reshaping care–work boundaries, and they offer policy implications for more flexible workplace arrangements and family-supportive governance frameworks.

Copyright

© 2026 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  - Zejin Wang
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/05/15
TI  - Breaking the Motherhood Penalty: A Study on Coping Strategies of Chinese Career Women Based on Structuration Theory
BT  - Proceedings of the 2026 5th International Conference on Social Sciences and Humanities and Arts (SSHA 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 492
EP  - 504
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-577-5_51
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-577-5_51
ID  - Wang2026
ER  -