Professor Liu Chengfang and colleagues published an article in The Journal of Development Studies (JDS)

Release date：2025/03/11　　Source： CCAP

Recently, the international academic journal The Journal of Development Studies (JDS) published online a research paper titled "Compulsory Education and Gender Inequality in China's Structural Transformation" by Professor Liu Chengfang, Vice Dean of the School of Advanced Agricultural Sciences  and Deputy Director of the China Center for Agricultural Policy,  Peking University，along with his collaborators.

Education is widely regarded as a crucial means of promoting gender equality. This study utilizes data from the 2018 China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) and employs the Cohort Difference-in-Differences (Cohort DID) method to analyze the impact of the 1986 Compulsory Education Law (CEL) on the educational attainment of rural residents and structural transformation, particularly focusing on intersectoral labor mobility and gender heterogeneity.

The findings indicate that while the implementation of CEL significantly improved the educational attainment of rural residents—especially women—and narrowed the gender gap in education within rural areas, its impact on reducing gender disparities in labor market outcomes (such as employment participation and wage levels) remained limited.

Mechanism analysis suggests that this phenomenon is mainly driven by systematic differences in migration decisions and occupational choices between male and female rural laborers. Specifically, rural men are more likely to migrate across provinces and enter low-skilled manufacturing jobs, whereas rural women tend to stay within their local counties, engaging in low-skilled service sector employment.

Further analysis indicates that this gendered division is primarily influenced by household labor division and social gender norms, rather than differences in cognitive abilities between men and women.

Dr. Gang Xie, a postdoctoral researcher at the School of Advanced Agricultural Sciences and China Center for Agricultural Policy, Peking University, is the first author of the paper. Professor  Liu Chengfang is the corresponding author, and Professor Scott Rozelle from Stanford University is a co-author.

Citation: Xie, Gang, Scott Rozelle, and Chengfang Liu*. 2025. “Compulsory Education and Gender Inequality in China’s Structural Transformation.” The Journal of Development Studies, March, 1–25.

Paper link: https://doi.org/10.1080/00220388.2025.2467690