Date of Award
6-26-2026
Date Published
August 2026
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Political Science
Advisor(s)
Dimitar Gueorguiev
Subject Categories
Political Science | Social and Behavioral Sciences
Abstract
The public sector is the primary pipeline to political office in China and is characterized by highly competitive entry as well as low gender representation, despite women in China exhibiting strong interest in and qualifications for public employment. This three-paper dissertation examines why public-sector employment in China is so popular, why gendered hiring practices are prevalent, and what the consequences of gendered hiring are. The first paper studies the returns to public-sector employment using individual-level transitions from the private to the public sector. Using a stacked difference-in-differences approach, I show that public employment contributes to significant improvements in satisfaction with job security, working hours, and overall job satisfaction. The second paper explores why gendered hiring is prevalent and increasingly so in China. Using administrative data on job postings from the National Civil Service Examination (NCSE), many of which explicitly state a preferred gender, together with data on the gender composition of shortlisted candidates, I investigate how the supply of shortlisted (qualified) women affects the demand for male candidates. The results show that as the supply of shortlisted women increases, the demand for male candidates also increases significantly. This tendency is especially pronounced in lower-level government agencies at the county and city levels. The third paper studies the costs of gendered hiring. Exploiting explicit gender preferences in job postings and combining these data with application records and posting-level candidate performance, I find that postings specifying a preference for male candidates are associated with substantially smaller applicant pools and lower candidate quality. These results are consistent across departments and administrative levels. They also hold when comparing otherwise identical female-preferred job postings, indicating that male-preferred advertisements distort the applicant pool and result in lower candidate quality. Together, these papers examine why public-sector employment is highly sought after, particularly in the Chinese context, shed light on the underrepresentation of women in the civil service despite a strong supply of qualified women, and reveal the institutional costs of gendered bureaucratic hiring.
Access
Open Access
Recommended Citation
Huang, Xiaoxia, "Public Employment and Gendered Recruitment in China" (2026). Dissertations - ALL. 2347.
https://surface.syr.edu/etd/2347
