Our Sociology Research Forum hosts Visiting Professor Suowei Xiao for a lecture titled, “’Childcare Experts’ and ‘Wiping Older People’s Ass’: The Stratification in the Domestic Work Market in Contemporary China.”
The devaluation of care work has been widely discussed in gender scholarship, but what remains underexamined is the growing stratification in paid care work. This study explores how different nurturant care jobs become stratified in the emerging market for domestic work in contemporary China, as childcare jobs come to be higher-paid “semi-professions” while elderly care is marginalized and under-compensated. We argue this stratification is driven by an interplay of state, market and cultural forces. Since the reform, the state has privatized care into the hands of families and paved ways for commercial domestic services as a solution to the private care deficit. Urban families, prioritize childcare over elderly care due to the growing trend of inverted generational hierarchy. Domestic work agencies, in response, take on a professionalization project for child and maternal care, formalizing and commercializing skills and knowledge needed in these services, while leaving elderly care as “dirty work”, underinvesting in skills and devaluing the emotional labor involved in caring for older people. The squeeze effect it creates, as those who are disadvantaged in the labor market (older, less educated and experienced) end up in elderly care, ironically provides a “human capital” justification for its low status and poor payment.
More about Professor Suowei Xiao:
Suowei Xiao is a Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of British Columbia and an Associate Professor of Sociology in her home institute, Beijing Normal University, China. She is the author of Desire and Dignity: Class, Gender, and Intimacy in Transitional China (2018) and a number of articles on gender, migration, family change, and class formation. Her current research examines the development of the domestic work market and its impact on family dynamics in contemporary China.