Events

CHAIRPERSON

Assoc Prof Feng Qiushi, Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

Women’s political participation, a common indicator of women’s status, has the potential to promote population health for women, as well as their families and communities. This study examined the longitudinal association between women’s leadership at the community level and individuals’ health and life satisfaction in contemporary China, an authoritarian, single-party state. We drew on longitudinal and multilevel data from the China Family and Panel Studies and estimated fixed-effects models to account for time-invariant unobserved heterogeneity at the individual level. Not all community leaders were created equal. We found that majority of the rural villagers’ committees elected male directors, but the gender pattern was reversed in the urban residents’ committees. In both rural and urban communities, female committee directors were over-qualified in terms of human capital, compared to their male peers. Residents living in female-directed communities had better mental health, but not physical health or life satisfaction, compared with those living in male-directed communities. This association was most prominent in rural women, but also observed in rural and urban men. For rural women, the mental health benefit of living in female-directed communities was partially explained by reduced personal experience of gender discrimination.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Xu Hongwei is a sociologist and social demographer by training, with a PhD in Sociology from Brown University. He joined the Department of Sociology at Queens College in September, 2018. Before that, he was an Assistant Research Professor at the Survey Research Center and the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan. His substantive research interests include social determinants of health, population aging, child development, place and space effects, and residential segregation. His methodological research areas include hierarchical modeling, spatial statistics, survival analysis, causal inference, and survey methods. He has conducted social research in diverse settings, including the United States, China, India, and Kenya. His research has been supported by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

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