sight. It includes pressure on women to avoid pregnancy, higher pay for male colleagues and fewer opportunities as women’s careers progress. In the 1950s, when Mao Zedong declared that “women held up half the sky”, in narrowly economic terms China looked egalitarian. Men and women had similar jobs as well as incomes, though both were miserable— and that was if you were lucky enough to escape becoming victims of Mao’s revolution-without-end. Today women in China more than match men in educational terms: 51% of university students are female, up by 14 percentage points since 1995. The picture at work, by contrast, has grown worse. Men on average now earn roughly a third more. In 1990 nearly 80% of women aged between 15 and 64 were in the labour force, one of the highest rates anywhere in the world. Today that has slipped to under 70%, below both Japan and the European Union. China’s business leadership is overwhelmingly male. Women are even rarer at the top of politics. For a quarter-century until 2022, the Politburo, the Communist Party’s top body, boasted a woman or two. Since then there have been none. Sexism is part of the problem. For businessmen and officials, the banqueting table is often where deals get done. But long boozy dinners (officially forbidden under Xi Jinping) can be offputting to women, or worse. A senior cadre and a property executive in Hangzhou, a wealthy east-central city, were recently accused of assaulting a young female employee after such a dinner. The incident provoked public outrage, including renewed calls to clean up the practice of banquets. A more common experience for women is less aggressive, though still demeaning. “Our bosses wouldn’t say it directly but they hope we act as decoration,” says Ms Dou, who worked in tech. Yet nothing is straightforward. Erica, a woman in her 20s in the events industry, says she has had more friction with female bosses than male ones. “We’re a patriarchal society, so when women break through and get power, they tend to be more controlling,” she says. The more pervasive problem is less that of outright sexism and more how women’s role, or potential role, as mothers clashes with work. A “motherhood penalty” is common nearly everywhere. But in China the penalty is especially high, owing to a fierce work culture, an outdated retirement system and an intensifying state-led fertility push colliding with entrenched career patterns.
Compared with other countries at its level of development, China has generous maternity leave: mothers can get about half a year off work, on full pay. But the state covers only part of the salary on leave, with employers paying for the bulk. Five women in their 30s and 40s told Chaguan that their bosses expected to be informed should they be trying to get pregnant. “Speaking as a former manager, I myself wasn’t all that willing to hire women under 35,” said Ms Chen, who used to work in media. “What if she comes in and gets pregnant right away?” The government’s recent push for two-child families, aimed at reversing a fast-declining fertility rate, adds to employers’ concerns that married women are liable to take extended breaks from work. After pregnancy, women face other hurdles. A common expectation that they will guide their children through school is hardly compatible with the long hours expected in many Chinese jobs. “Men the same age as me are in a better position,” says Ms Dou, in her early 40s. “There’s an assumption that they don’t have as much responsibility at home.” Job ads often state that candidates should be able to tolerate high stress, regularly work overtime and always be reachable. Such requirements do not discriminate specifically against women, but are deterrents to any parent with their hands full with young children—usually the mother. Nor is there much runway left for a woman returning to work, perhaps in her early 40s. In white-collar jobs the official retirement age is just a few months over 55 for women and 60 for men (by 2040 these will be raised gradually to 58 and 63, respectively). Companies have less incentive to invest in mid- career women who have taken time off for children. “The job market is already biased enough against women,” says Ms Wu, a former web designer who left to have a child. “After 35 it is like frost on top of snow.” She is taking matters into her own hands, retraining as a drone pilot. Policy tweaks would help, including making maternity and paternity leave more equal (many places give fathers 15 days, if they take any). More state funding for paid leave would ease the financial strain on companies. Men and women should also have the same (higher) retirement ages. Yet what women are up against is less skewed policy than powerful social norms, especially the weight placed upon mothers. Until that changes, China
is undermining its own potential. In educational terms, Chinese women already hold up more than half the sky today. In the world of work, they are getting just about a third of it. ■ This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com/china/2026/08/24/chinese-women-are-falling-behind-in-the- office
Donald Trump is at last building his border wall From battleships to catapults, Trump keeps messing with the navy Does Donald Trump deserve credit for a manufacturing revival? Shrimpers are the latest group seeking protection from Washington The state that could shape the winning Democratic message
Donald Trump is at last building his border wall The barrier serves many goals, but may fail at its most important one Aug 27th 2026 Above the dirt roads and cattle guards of Arizona’s San Rafael Valley, welders are at work. Sparks fly as a man stitches flat pieces of steel to concrete-filled beams. Eventually, two walls, each 30-feet (9m) in height and running in parallel, will stretch across the valley’s remote grasslands, dividing Arizona from Sonora, Mexico. “I will build a great, great wall,” Donald Trump promised in 2015, in the speech announcing his run for the White House. More than a decade later, the barrier in the San Rafael Valley is just one section of a “smart wall” that the White House is planning across America’s border with Mexico. Not since the interstate highway system has the federal government embarked on a construction project of similar scale.
The wall serves more than one purpose, and will have broad effects. To Mr Trump’s base, it helps to fulfil a campaign promise. To government contractors, it presents an opportunity. To would-be migrants, it provides an enduring symbol of Mr Trump’s command to keep out. The wall will transform the nature of the border between America and Mexico, and the communities that reside near it. However the wall’s purported goal is to end illegal immigration, and on that it will have limited impact. America’s border with Mexico spans nearly 2,000 miles (3,219km). Those seeking to curb migration across it have long faced a basic problem: when they would increase enforcement on one part of the vast frontier, migrants would simply go around. But since the 2010s, migrants have responded mainly not to shifts in enforcement but shifts in broader policy, particularly on asylum. Migrants determined that they should give themselves up to Border Patrol agents, rather than try to outrun them, a practice that surged in response to the more lenient stance of Joe Biden’s presidency. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the agency tasked with securing America’s borders, recorded more than 300,000 migrant encounters at the southern border in December 2023. The number of migrant encounters with Border Patrol began to plummet towards the end of Mr Biden’s term when he, belatedly, restricted asylum. They have dropped a further 79% in Mr Trump’s second term. The president all but ended asylum, and his aggressive detention and deportation campaign serves as a deterrent. CBP is taking a victory lap. Smugglers are no longer capable “of running 50, 100, 300 people through at a time”, says John Morris, the chief of Border Patrol in the Tucson sector, which spans hundreds of miles in Arizona. “It’s onesies and twosies.” Yet the president is keen to build his wall nonetheless, to create a barrier that will withstand any loosening in policy by his successors. Some wall already exists (see map). Every president since George H.W. Bush has erected border barriers, including the Democrats. In Cochise County, Arizona, a rust-coloured 18-foot wall with concertina wire built during George W. Bush’s presidency connects with a 30-foot steel wall, part
of the 450 miles of barriers Mr Trump erected in his first term, mostly to replace existing ones. The border is already equipped with technology, too. The Cochise County sheriff’s department operates roughly 1,300 cameras that capture images of potential migrants (and sometimes hikers). Sensors alert CBP when people get close to the border. When your correspondent visited the frontier with Verlon Jose, chairman of the Tohono O’odham Nation, a Native American reservation, agents showed up in trucks. Mexico’s military soon arrived on their side of the border. A soldier holding a gun surveyed the scene before deciding that the group posed no threat. However no previous administration has attempted to build a border wall of this scale or sophistication. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which Congress passed last year and which administration officials lovingly refer to as “OB3”, allocates $47bn to barriers, access roads and technology. Another $20bn from OB3 allows CBP to expand its ranks and buy new kit. When Mr Trump began his second term, nearly 650 miles of wall snaked across the southern border. Now contracts have been awarded for new barriers spanning more than two-thirds of the frontier. He plans to wall off more than 600 more miles of previously naked terrain, and upgrade or