Gender Inequality In Education In The Gish Irish

In the Gish Jen’s short story "Who 's Irish?," the main character is a determined Chinese woman who moved to America and now, in her old age, she is nearing her limits when she cannot handle her granddaughters behavior and how she is being raised. The story was writing in 1956 and while reading it I became interesting in knowing about gender inequality in China and if it has changed in the last several decades. Noted in the short story, the women was feared by her husband and other men because she was “fierce.” Not many Chinese women were independent and could make lives for themselves, duo to them being considered the lower gender and having little to no education. It was common for men in China to receive education, while women were confined …show more content…
The one-child policy, which started in the late 1970’s, has had many conversations on if it is a successful policy or a harmful one, but recent studies have shown that it does have a positive effect on gender equality in education. In Ming-Hsuan Lees study on gender inequality in education, she notes that “The one-child policy has been shown to inadvertently increase gender equality in education through creating one-child households; that is, there was less opportunity for parents to display son preference” (244). This is mostly in urban areas however, due to it being more enforced there then in rural, but because it has made families with only one child, that child will receive educational benefits despite their gender and thus increasing school enrollment (254). Professor Fengshu Liu observers in her studies that “Little difference related to education…between only-girl and only-boy families has been found. This forms a striking contrast with the Chinese tradition in which parents’ academic expectations and investments were limited to their sons,” and with this she concludes that the one-child policy has highly effected gender inequality in a positive way