CRI听力:Income Inequality Widens in China

A famous Mao Zedong phrase is that women hold up half the sky. Nowadays Mao's words still ring true but women are getting paid less than men. In the last two decades, the average income of urban women has dropped from 80 per cent to 70 per cent of what men earn.

Julie Broussard is the United Nation's Women Country Program Manager for China, which works closely with All-China Women's Federation. Broussard says that before late 1970's, women had access to resources like subsidized daycares that allowed a greater focus on employment.

"Since the move to the market economy, what's happened is there are no longer the subsidized daycares. Daycares are now offered through the market economy and they're priced quite steeply and a lot of families can't afford them. So the women face a very tough choice, do I go to work and put my kid in this expensive day care or do I stay home and take care of my kids when they're young but give up on several years on employment and opportunities for promotion. Or in some cases it's the grandmother's who look after the child, which again puts the burden on women."

Chinese women make up just shy of half of the country's labour market, with 45 per cent of all employees are women, but they are under represented in the top income earning positions. According to a recent Bloomberg report, only one out 120 national level state-owned enterprises has a female CEO.

In non-state owned enterprises, a Grant Thornton report finds that women account for about one quarter of the senior executive positions.

Shirley Zhou is an in house lawyer in the Beijing office of a Mongolian mining company. Zhou says that in her last job in a Beijing law firm there were far more men than women in the top positions.

"At the beginning, the junior lawyers there's more women, but at the senior lawyer level it's equal but at the partner level there's more men. Women have to consider more family I think. They not only have to consider work but also consider to take care of the parents, children and husband. Their ambitions will be weaker than before."

But it's the women who live in China's rural areas that have been the hardest hit.Rural women's income dropped from 80 percent to 56 percent of men's over the last two decades. Broussard explains:

"Rural women are fairing the worst when it comes to income inequality. It comes down to access to resources, so on average rural women have an even lower education, they have less access to financial resources and capital. They don't have as easy access to decent employment of international standards much less so than urban women and patriarchal culture is stronger in rural areas than it is in urban areas."

Broussard also says that China is not alone in this trend and that the widening gap in all inequalities is global issue.

For CRI, I'm Alexandra Blucher.