Women’s Fertility Autonomy in Urban China: The Role of Couple Dynamics Under the Universal Two-Child Policy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Under China’s universal two-child policy, decisions about whether to have a second birth become more dynamic, flexible, and subject to negotiation between the spouses; moreover, how women can maintain their fertility autonomy has far-reaching implications for gender equality. Using valuable, new data from the 2016 Survey of the Fertility Decision-Making Processes in Chinese Families, we examine the relationship between couple dynamics and women’s fertility autonomy in urban China. If women want no more than one child and already have one, intending to have a second birth indicates low fertility autonomy. Couple dynamics are measured by conjugal power structure and spousal pressure on fertility. We find that only if women have less marital power than their husbands, greater fertility pressure from husband is associated with a higher likelihood that women intend to have a second birth. In addition, when investigating the determinants of couple dynamics, we find that women’s marital power depends on their relative resources, whereas fertility pressure from husband persists regardless. The findings suggest that in post-reform urban China, growing gender inequalities in labor markets likely reduce women’s marital power, which in turn negatively affects their fertility autonomy. We urge greater research and policy attention to gender equality issues in the era of the universal two-child policy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".