The Slow Revolution: Women’s Futures in China’s Late Meritocracy

How are women forging livable futures at a moment when they have won unprecedented access to education, but the promise of upward mobility is fraying and patriarchal pressures are resurging? This talk examines this question through the lives of educated Chinese women.In China, women are outperforming men in education and becoming increasingly mobile, even as they navigate slowing economic growth, discriminatory labor markets, and mounting pressure to marry and have children “on time.” Based on long-term ethnographic research with students and graduates from mainland China moving through Singapore as a regional hub, I show how women use migration to widen possibility, negotiate with the social clock, and piece together livable futures. In China, as across much of the world, women’s educational ascent is transforming family life, gender expectations, and the meaning of adulthood. This slow revolution, I argue, is unsettling the patriarchal foundations on which modern states and systems of social reproduction have long depended, even as it collides with demographic anxiety, reactionary backlash, and the weakening promise of meritocracy. 

Bio: Zachary M. Howlett is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the National University of Singapore. His research focuses on meritocracy, mobility, and kinship in China and Chinese overseas communities. He is the author of Meritocracy and Its Discontents: Anxiety and the National College Entrance Exam in China (Cornell University Press, 2021).

This event is organized by the Graduate School in Asian Studies