The study found that the association between women and the private sphere remained strong throughout the period analysed, according to the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post, which published an article covering parts of the study on Sunday.
The researchers, Jia Wang of Hong Kong Polytechnic University and Ruiyu Zhang of the University of Hong Kong, analysed more than 125,000 articles published in the People’s Daily between 1990 and 2023.
For decades, the party promoted Mao Zedong’s slogan that “women hold up half the sky” as a guiding principle for gender equality. But the narrative in China’s official media has shifted in recent years, emphasising women’s familial roles, according to a recent study that analysed articles in the People’s Daily, the CCP’s official mouthpiece. The ruling CCP has for decades claimed that women have played an active role in “socialist modernisation and reform and opening up”. However, a widening gap in the portrayal of women began to emerge in the late 1990s, according to the study. In 2017, in 2017, People’s Daily ran an article titled “Giving birth is easy, raising children is difficult”, in which the paper quoted a woman who had quit work when her child entered school.
Published in the journal Frontiers in Sociology in May, the study found that the People’s Daily had increasingly associated women with domestic and family roles while giving less prominence to their roles in the public sphere. From the late 1990s onwards, however, the gap widened, with references linking women to public roles declining, the study found. The study found that the association between women and the private sphere remained strong throughout the period analysed, according to the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post, which published an article covering parts of the study on Sunday.