Patriarchal Cultural Norms and Women's Welfare: Evidence from China Under the One-Child Policy

1 Research Questions
Patriarchy is a hierarchical system where men are privileged by virtue of their biological sex and use this to control and dominate women, promoting differential gender roles (Millett, 2016). To be more precise, it not only leads to missing women and affects the economic participation of surviving women in terms of job and financial markets, but also adversely influences the overall economic efficiency through patriarchal norms (Sen, 1990; Hayashi and Prescott, 2008; Dildar, 2015; Guiso and Zaccaria, 2023). In the Chinese context, patriarchy is centered on traditional family institutions. It thus manifests itself in a dual hierarchy of generations and genders, namely, the power of seniors over juniors and men over women (Santos and Harrell, 2016). This cultural structure in China has commonalities with other developing countries, such as the Arab world. Therefore, the study of Chinese patriarchy's contemporary influences and effects will be conducive to the understanding and solution of issues in these similar countries.
This thesis will investigate the role of patriarchal cultural norms and their present-day manifestations in China. It has been shown that gender inequality in the size and quality of social networks could result in inequality in many other domains such as human capital and occupational prestige (Teachman et al., 1997; Burt, 1998; Portes and Landolt, 2000; Lin, 2000). The thesis will thus focus on how patriarchy leads to the poverty of women's social capital, with indirect negative implications for other socioeconomic outcomes.

2 Literature Review
The poverty of women's social capital in China is characterised by a small network size and positional differences because of the typical composition of family members and neighbours (commonly called "strong ties"). By contrast, men's social networks generally consist of friends and workmates ("weak ties"), which can give access to higher-quality resources (Granovetter, 1973; Wu and Shi, 2005). Women's dependence on kinship suggests that women may find it harder to build social capital (Lin, 2002).
Gender inequality is embedded in patriarchy (Jayachandran, 2015). Existing studies have shown that patriarchal cultural norms impact different aspects of the gender gap including education, migration, labour force participation, competition, and career advancement (Albrecht et al., 2003; Gneezy et al., 2009; Amirapu and Asadullah, 2022; Buchmann et al., 2023; Uberti and Douarin, 2023). However, we know little about the relationship between patriarchal cultural norms and social capital.
Given the wide-ranging impacts of social capital on education, employment, autonomy, and well-being (Helliwell, 2006; Beaman et al., 2018; Kandpal and Baylis, 2019; Brenoe and Zölitz, 2020), a series of sociological studies in China have explored the causes of women's social capital poverty (Zhu, 2000; Tan and Li, 2002; Cai, 2005; Li, 2010). However, these studies have tended to put more emphasis on qualitative analysis. There is scope, therefore, for quantitative analysis using the latest econometric techniques to provide complementary evidence on these important topics. This thesis will explore women's social capital poverty from an economic perspective using state-of-the-art empirical methods and will be the first for China. It will deepen our understanding of the gendered impacts of patriarchal culture and the path to female empowerment.