Yue Qian

Progress toward gender equality remains uneven across the public and private spheres.Connecting these spheres is essential for charting a fuller gender revolution. Situated in the Chinese context, my dissertation centres on workplace authority—the legitimate power to supervise and influence others—and examines how it intersects with gender and family dynamics in married different-sex couples. My first empirical chapter draws on seven waves of longitudinal data (2010–2022) from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) to assess gender and parenthood inequalities in access to and scope of workplace authority. Results from fixed-effects linear probability and hybrid negative binomial models show that overall, women’s likelihood and scope of supervisory authority decrease following parenthood, especially after having two or more children, while men experience no significant changes. By work sector, a considerable motherhood penalty is concentrated in the private sector, whereas a fatherhood premium exists solely in the state sector. The second empirical chapter analyzes the CFPS data to examine how couples’ workplace authority configuration shapes their division of housework. Fixed-effects estimates demonstrate that when wives attain authority but husbands not, husbands increase housework participation and thereby reduce wives’ share of housework. The third empirical chapter uses cross-sectional data from the Chinese General Social Survey (2017–2023) to examine how personal and spousal workplace authority are associated with individual well-being, focusing on variation by gender and gender ideology. Results from logistic regression models show that among individuals with egalitarian rather than traditional gender beliefs, women’s happiness is less contingent on their husbands’ authority, whereas men’s well-being benefits more from their wives’ authority.Taken together, these findings foreground workplace authority as a crucial mechanism linking work and family domains that reshapes gender inequality. Disparities disadvantaging mothers in authority, a core workplace resource, can perpetuate gender and parenthood inequalities in work conditions and organizational policies. However, women’s attainment of workplace authority can extend into family life, advancing gender equality in the division of domestic labour and supporting well-being for both men and women.

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Interracial relationships are often viewed as indicators of social change. Scholars tend to interpret an increased number of these relationships to be a wider acceptance and integration of racial diversity, and the closing of the racial divide. However, few studies examine how couples respond to the historically based and politically charged social pressures of racial mixing. The purpose of this research is to extend the literature in the subfield by investigating the impact of these pressures and the tools that the couples employ to navigate them. To better understand how interracial couples perceive race and cope with racism, I used purposive sampling to select individuals in Black/White unions from both Vancouver and Toronto, Canada. I conducted two- hour, semi-structured, face-to-face interviews with 37 participants. The results revealed through flexible coding are three-fold. First, after considering the literature on Black identity formation and development, and isolating the responses of the Black participants, the data showed that Black identity is too narrowly depicted and defined. It excludes the many expressions of blackness. The Black participants in this study engaged in restructuring and reframing their identity based on circumstances and experiences. Second, perspective and identity shifts were evident in the White participants. Witnessing racism directed toward their partners and children led them to shift from a white racial frame into a process that I call racial frame convergence. Third, while focusing on the Black/White couple as the unit analysis, I identified processes of racialized trust development and maintenance.

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