Speaker: Prof. Danielle Kane (Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, Purdue University)

Time: 9:30am–11:00am, 28 March 2025 (Friday, HK Time)

Venue: ZOOM (ZOOM Link will be sent to registered audience after finished the e-registration)

Registration: https://cloud.itsc.cuhk.edu.hk/mycuform/view.php?id=3269425

About the Webinar:
American researchers have established the importance of parents’ financial assistance for attaining the milestones of adulthood, contributing to the reproduction of socioeconomic inequality, but have not examined the role of parental advice. China researchers have outlined the importance of parental advice for marriage decision-making but do not investigate socioeconomic background. Neither stream of work makes a full comparison of gender in the transition to adulthood. Drawing on 100 interviews with young adults in southwestern China, I find that youth heard from their parents that women were vulnerable and needed protection, and that men should provide that protection. Specific parental directives, however, varied with gender and socioeconomic background, intersecting in a matrix of domination (Hamilton et al., 2019) that was driven by the norms of gender essentialism and hypergamy, motivating men to become marriageable through professional success and motivating women to focus on attracting these men instead of their own careers.

About the Speaker:
Dr. Kane is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and received her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. Her work focuses on gender and the role of parents in the transition to adulthood, with a particular emphasis on China. Dr. Kane’s prior research has examined gender and social networks, as well as religion in East Asia. Her work has appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, Poetics, and Current Sociology.