‘Leftover women’: A sociolinguistic study of gender bias in Chinese
-
Lin He
,
Rong Chen
Abstract
This study is an investigation of a newly-created Chinese lexeme shengnü ‘leftover women’, referring to single women beyond the socially expected marrying age. Data from an online survey of 416 respondents reveals the various aspects of gender bias against women as seen in the coined term. They also provide evidence that gender bias is waning, as younger and female respondents are more likely to view shengnü as more offensive, to see the reasons for being ‘leftover’ as women’s desire for independence and freedom, and to identify society as the source of pressure for women to marry. Our study contributes to the field of sociolinguistics via its investigation of shengnü with other aspects of the Chinese language, by adopting a social media survey data gathering method – which offered us a sizable sample – and by being possibly the first empirical sociolinguistic study of gender bias via a detailed investigation of the various aspects of a particular lexeme in the Chinese language.
7 Acknowledgment
This study is funded by the Shaanxi Provincial Social Science Fund (2018M06).
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[Note: This is the translation of the original Chinese version of the questionnaire. We also changed the formatting of questions to save space, as the actual questionnaire was designed to fit the cell phone screen and looked very different.]
We are doing a research project on the phrase leftover women. Please respond to the following questions. Your identity will be kept confidential forever, even from us.
You are
Male ____ Female ____
You are in the following age group.
18-28 ___ 29-45 ___ 46-60 ___ 61 and above __
Your level of education is
High school and below ____ Undergraduate ____ Graduate _____
You think that a ‘leftover woman’ is someone over the age of
28 ___ 32 ___ 35 ___
You believe that the reasons for a woman to become ‘leftover’ are (please check an appropriate box for each reason)
| STRONGLY DISAGREE | DISAGREE | AGREE | STRONGLY AGREE | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Being financially independent | ||||
| Being influenced by the trend of staying single | ||||
| Being intellectually independent | ||||
| Being more competent than men | ||||
| Being too busy to date | ||||
| Being too old for marriage | ||||
| Being too successfula | ||||
| Fear of marriage | ||||
| Introvert personality (not conducive to dating) | ||||
| Mass media encouragement for late marriage | ||||
| Not having good looks, good job, or wealth | ||||
| Standards for marriage too highb | ||||
| Valuing and desiring freedom |
atoo affluent, too educated, and(or) holding a too high a position at work or in society to find a partner.
bexpecting partner to be affluent, well educated, owing property, or be supportive.
Leftover women are faced with the pressure to marry. Please rate each of the options about pressure on leftover woman by checking the appropriate box.
| PRESSURE | STRONGLY DISAGREE | DISAGREE AGREE | STRONGLY AGREE |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anxiety about remaining single | |||
| Feeling of loneliness | |||
| Gossips about not being married | |||
| Parents’ demand for marriage | |||
| Peers getting married | |||
| TOTAL |
People are getting married later than it was the case before. Do you think this is a positive change in society?
Yes ___ No ___ No opinion ____
What do you think are the values of women? In the following table, the column on the right lists what women should pursue or do in their life. Indicate your opinion about each by checking the appropriate box.
| STRONGLY DISAGREE | DISAGREE | AGREE | STRONGLY AGREE | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Career and fin. independence | ||||
| Fashion | ||||
| Freedom of action | ||||
| Home-making | ||||
| Possession of Knowledge | ||||
| Power and social status |
What is your opinion about the phrase leftover women?
I think it is offensive _____; I think it is neutral _____
When you use or hear other people use the term leftover woman, how old do you think the woman being talked about is?
18 and above ________; 32 and above ________; 35 and above ________
© 2022 Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland
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Articles in the same Issue
- Table of contents
- A dependent case approach to complex event nominals in standard Arabic
- Word-formation and reduplication in standard Arabic: A new distributed morphology approach
- Predicting foreign language skills based on first languages: The role of lexical distance and relative morphological complexity
- Formulaic language in oral academic discourse socialization of graduate students in a Northern Cyprus university
- ‘Leftover women’: A sociolinguistic study of gender bias in Chinese
- The syntax of plurals of collective and mass nouns: Views from Jordanian Arabic
- Attitudes of Nigerian expatriates towards accents of English
- Synthetic -BLE compounds VS. -BLE adjectives: Issues in the external and internal syntax
- English loan translations in Polish in the area of computers: Syntactic aspects
- Engagement in Chinese criminal judgments
