Chinese Kinship and Labor Deployment

The Sawyer Seminar Series on Gender Bias in the Past and Future of Asia is held at Stanford University.

This three-quarter-long seminar series is a John E. Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Cultures funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The series examines factors contributing to, and implications of, the male-biased population sex ratio in contemporary China, contemporary India, and late imperial China. The significance of this topic is difficult to over-estimate. There are an estimated 60-100 million “missing” girls and women in Asia, and the Chinese government expects 50 million “surplus” men by 2050. Sex-selective abortions, which contribute significantly to this bias, are widely used in China, India, and even parts of the US with large Asian immigrant communities, including Santa Clara County, California.

Professor Hill Gates is a retired lecturer and Professor Emerita at the Department of Anthropological Sciences, Stanford University. She has worked on ethnicity, class and gender relations in Taiwan and China. Her recent research deals with girls'labor in China in early 20th century, in which she studies the economic coorelates of footbinding and challenges overemphasis on the erotic motivation of this custom.