Abstract: One of China’s most important institutions is its hukou system, a registry that assigns benefits to household members based on rural or urban location. Changes in hukou status are not easy, but hukou mobility from rural to urban status is an important path to upward social mobility in China. While this hukou conversion is well covered in the literature pertaining to other research, previous studies have failed to solve the puzzle as to why this status change is achieved more often by rural women than rural men, even though these women are less likely to have more education, Communist Party membership, or military service – the three best-known predictors of hukou mobility in China. I believe this lapse in previous studies is because researchers assume that mobility is gender-neutral and then only examine the predictors of hukou conversion that favor rural men. These studies overlook a crucial predictor that probably favors women – marriage – and thus
their findings are subject to an omitted variable bias. Using the Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS) 2008, a nationally representative dataset with unique information on the hukou conversion process, this paper explicitly brings the gender perspective into hukou mobility studies and finds gender-specific pathways in the hukou conversion process. The patterns of gendered divergence in hukou mobility reflect how the socioeconomic status of rural migrants is shaped by the institutional, economic, and sociocultural factors that impose constraints and provide opportunities in China.

Key words: China, gender, Hukou, social mobility