China’s Floating Pavillion: Gender Inequality and Women in STEM

For Li Aili, founder and chairwoman of Yuanhua Intelligent Technology, a pioneer in China’s medical robotics sector, innovation is not what the Chinese proverb calls a “pavilion in the air” (空中楼阁 kōngzhōng lóugé) but a grounded, compassionate practice with tangible, real-world impact. A similar pursuit drives Xia Yu, a female scientist and the founder and CEO of Akeso, a Chinese biotech company, whose new cancer drug recently outperformed Merck’s industry-leading $30 billion-per-year Keytruda in Phase 3 clinical trials for lung cancer.

Together, Li and Xia embody the ideal that President Xi Jinping articulated at the opening ceremony of the Global Leaders’ Meeting on Women in Beijing: women playing a vital role in economic and social development, fighting at the forefront of scientific and technological innovation. The event commemorated the 30th anniversary of the landmark 1995 UN Fourth World Conference on Women, where the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action were adopted and promised to advance women’s rights, empowerment, and gender equality globally, including in China.

However, China’s leadership is moving further away from its promises, despite Xi’s claims of ostensible progress, asserting that Chinese women are now “participating in the entire process of national and social governance with unprecedented confidence and vigor,” and positioning them as “protagonists.” The clearest testament to this regression lies in Xi’s addresses to the All-China Women’s Federation (ACWF) – the official state women’s organization under the Communist Party – in 2013, 2018, and 2023. Across these speeches, Xi consistently advanced patriarchal narratives that cast women primarily as caretakers and moral anchors within the family. Yet his 2023 address marked a further step, urging the cultivation of “a new type of marriage and parenting culture” and the promotion of childbirth, effectively marginalizing women’s professional work and silencing their agency beyond domestic and reproductive roles.

The STEM Frontier: Between Rhetoric and Reality

The implications of Xi’s shifting priorities for women in China extend far beyond the rhetorical sphere. Their impact reverberates across the very sectors the state holds up as emblems of national progress and modernization. In fields such as science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), where figures like Li Aili and Xia Yu excel, the tension between ideology and pragmatism becomes especially pronounced.

Women in STEM are celebrated as symbols of national progress, yet this recognition often amounts to ideological instrumentalization. They are valued primarily as a labor force to drive national development goals and to project an image of modernity, progress, and national strength, rather than as fully empowered agents in their own right. Simultaneously, this exists in stark tension with the state’s enduring patriarchal and pro-natalist policies, driven by demographic concerns, which continue to frame women primarily as reproducers and custodians of family life.

This paradox is also exposed by the data which reveals that beneath the state’s celebration of women’s purported achievements in science and technology lies a persistent pattern of underrepresentation, pay disparities, and barriers that limit advancement. Official figures show that nearly 40 million women are employed in science and technology, making up 45.8 percent of China’s STEM workforce. Yet fewer than three million work in research and development.

Meanwhile, despite remarkable gains in education – women now constitute over 52 percent of undergraduates and more than half of graduate students – China’s academic landscape remains deeply gendered. In 2022–23, women accounted for 63 percent of all new university entrants, but in elite institutions and STEM-focused majors, male dominance quickly reasserts itself. At the prestigious C9 universities (China’s top tier), female undergraduates make up only 37.7 percent, well below the national average. Disciplinary divides are even starker: physics departments in some universities record male-to-female ratios of 19:1, while women comprise only 25–30 percent of students in computer science and electronic engineering.

These figures reveal more than gaps in enrollment – they expose structural filters that narrow women’s paths at every stage. The “leaky pipeline” begins with specialization choices and extends through academic hiring, promotion, and leadership. As of 2019, women made up just 6 percent of academicians in the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and 5 percent in the Chinese Academy of Engineering (CAE). In the 2023 academy elections, out of 59 new CAS members, only five were women, while the CAE elected 74 new members, of whom just one was female.

Women also face systemic disadvantages in funding and visibility. They are underrepresented on peer review panels and high-level selection committees, reducing their chances of securing grants. Although women make up roughly half of university instructors, they occupy only one-third of master’s advisor roles and fewer than 17 percent of doctoral advisor positions. Pay disparities are substantial: across sectors and education levels, women earn on average only 71.6 percent of what men do. In high-prestige publishing, the imbalance is also stark: in 2023, only five of 101 corresponding authors with Chinese affiliations in “Nature” were women, highlighting their scarcity in global scientific leadership.

Continuities and Contestations: Feminism and the Future of Women’s Agency

Yet the challenges women face in STEM are not isolated – they reflect a longer history of gendered constraints and feminist activism in China. As early as the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Western feminism, rooted in liberal ideals of individual rights and autonomy, sought to affirm women as rational citizens entitled to legal and political recognition. Chinese feminism, by contrast, emerged in the context of national modernization and liberation from feudalism and imperialism. Following 1949, Mao Zedong’s famous dictum that “women hold up half the sky” reframed empowerment as a collective contribution to socialist nation-building rather than a pursuit of individual rights.

From the 1950s to the 1970s, Chinese leaders “publicly celebrated gender equality” and “boasted the biggest female workforce in the world,” largely as a strategy to boost national productivity. Yet by the 1990s, economic reforms deepened gender inequality, and the 1995 UN Fourth World Conference on Women helped catalyze a new wave of feminist activism. This activism largely operated through institutions, most notably the ACWF, which, despite its mandate to protect women’s rights, often function as a mechanism of control, enforcing policies such as the One-Child Policy and monitoring women’s reproductive lives.

It was not until around 2012 that a new generation of feminist activists emerged, independent of Party structures. Using social media, performance art, and grassroots organizing, these women have been challenging gender norms, sexual harassment, domestic violence, and structural inequality, often at considerable personal risk. Under Xi Jinping, an intensified crackdown on civil society and heightened intolerance of any organization perceived as challenging Party authority rendered these feminist movements increasingly vulnerable.

The perceived threat was starkly illustrated on the eve of International Women’s Day in 2015, when five feminists were detained for planning an anti-sexual harassment campaign. Despite this repression, the spirit of resistance persisted. In 2018, independent journalist Huang Xueqin helped ignite China’s #MeToo movement by publicly recounting her own experience of sexual harassment and encouraging others to do the same. Yet on June 14, 2024, Huang was sentenced to five years in prison for “inciting subversion of state power” – catch-all charge often used to silence perceived critics of the state and suppress dissent.

Huang’s case is only one of many that exemplifies how feminist activists and women human rights defenders continue to face escalating state repression, including censorship, surveillance, arbitrary detention, harassment, and politically motivated prosecutions. In such a regressive environment, the advancement of Chinese women is, indeed, in danger of becoming, as Li Aili put it, a mere “floating pavilion in the air” – visible, impressive, and celebrated, yet precariously detached from the everyday lived realities of women.

Grounding this pavilion, ensuring that Chinese women in STEM and beyond can thrive not merely as tokens of progress but as fully empowered agents, is both a moral imperative and a strategic necessity. Xi’s recent emphasis on “building a modernized industrial system” and advancing “self-reliance and self-strengthening in science and technology,” articulated at the just-concluded Fourth Plenum, underscores that the full realization of these techno-national ambitions is far from assured without women’s genuine participation and leadership. Without their engagement, such aspirations risk remaining suspended like a pavilion without its foundation.