The Relationship between China's One-Child Policy and Female Empowerment

Vanessa Fong (2002) theorised that China's One-Child Policy (OCP; 1979–2016) enhanced female empowerment by removing competition from sons and allowing daughters to obtain resources traditionally reserved for sons. However, no systematic review has comprehensively assessed the available evidence on this issue. Drawing on Fong’s framework, we examined the relationship between the OCP and female empowerment across seven subfields: family investment and parental support, education, employment and career development, gender attitudes and norms, intergenerational relationships, reproductive rights and autonomy, and other social dynamics. We searched six scientific databases, yielding 1265 sources and, after applying exclusion criteria, analyzed 32 studies published between 2002 and 2024. The majority (21 of 32) report a positive relationship between the OCP and female empowerment. Resource concentration driven by reduced sibling size emerges as a central mechanism, benefiting only-daughters in family investment, education, and career development. In contrast, impacts on mothers are more mixed; while the OCP reduced childbirth burdens and enhanced life autonomy, it also violated reproductive rights and imposed disproportionate contraceptive burdens on women. Moreover, it emerges the OCP's empowering effects were contingent on external conditions, such as local educational and economic resources or place of residence. We point out various research gaps in the existing literature, amongst other the consistent failure to distinguish the OCP’s effects from concurrent socio-economic transformations. Nonetheless, the evidence suggests that the OCP, together with broader social changes, has shaped women's lives and promoted female empowerment, although its impacts were neither uniform nor inherent, but rather shaped by contextual factors.