Escaping the “Perfect Woman”: Reflections on and Resistance to Traditional Gender Roles by Female Lawyers in First-Tier Cities

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-509-6_56How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Undoing Gender; Gender Practice; Female Lawyers; China’s First-Tier Cities

Abstract

Against the background of modernization of Chinese society and the increasing participation of women in the profession, more and more female lawyers have gradually emerged in the legal profession as a traditionally “male-dominated” field. However, they still face gender bias, promotion barriers, and expectations of traditional gender roles to varying degrees during their career development. This study focuses on female lawyers in China’s first-tier cities from the perspective of “undoing gender” theory, and explores how they actively resist, adapt, and deconstruct gender norms through their professional practices, and construct their own professional identities. The study adopts the qualitative research method of semi-structured interviews to analyze the gender practices and resistance strategies of female lawyers in their lives and workplaces. The study found that female lawyers in Shenzhen have a stronger sense of gender awareness in their practice, and generally believe that professional competence is superior to gender attributes, with fewer explicit manifestations of gender bias. Nevertheless, they still show strategic gender adjustment behaviors in their marriage and parenting decisions and career paths, reflecting the negotiation and stage-by-stage resistance of “undoing gender” in the real workplace.

Copyright

© 2025 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

Download article (PDF)

TY  - CONF
AU  - Xinyu Li
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/12/15
TI  - Escaping the “Perfect Woman”: Reflections on and Resistance to Traditional Gender Roles by Female Lawyers in First-Tier Cities
BT  - Proceedings of the 2025 International Conference on Mental Growth and Human Resilience (MGHR 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 514
EP  - 523
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-509-6_56
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-509-6_56
ID  - Li2025
ER  -