Gender Differences In Hong Kong

Since the emergence of the feminism advocated the equality of gender, the discussions of eliminating gender differences are always the hot topic in society. While most of the people believe that the sexism is the only reason leads to gender inequality and discrimination, a black feminist legal scholar Kimberley Crenshaw (1989) argues that this is a dominated idea which constructed by white feminist scholars, but, in fact, the gender discriminations that female face are mostly intersect with other factors, and that is what she calls ‘intersectionality’. The intersectional theory constructed a new perspective to women’s studies which the feminist scholars no longer consider ‘women’ as a single category to study since all the people have more

According to the report ‘Hong Kong Poverty Situation Report on Ethnic Minorities 2014’ (Census and Statistics Department, 2015b), there were 192400 of ethnic minorities (excluding the foreign domestic helpers) in Hong Kong in 2011, including the Southeast Asians, South Asians (SAs) and East Asians and other foreigners (e.g. Whites, Japanese and Koreans), and reveals that the SAs and Southeast Asians are less likely to obtain higher educational attainment. The finding discovers that the education level of East Asians and Whites in Hong Kong is generally higher, while the educational attainment of some of the Southeast Asians and SAs are relatively low, which only 38.9% of SAs obtained post-secondary education. Meanwhile, the report also finds that the SAs households are tend to have more children, and accounted for over half of the Comprehensive Social Service Assistance (CSSA) recipients in ethnic minorities, representing that there are certain amount of South Asians families were the low-income household. Since there are lower percentage of female obtain higher education in Hong Kong, it is possible to predict that the South and Southeast Asian women are facing a big challenge in obtaining higher education which they may suffer from the multiple discrimination in society as being an ethnic minority, a working-class, and a female. In fact,

Chinese is the official language in Hong Kong which is the compulsory subject in primary and secondary education. Although most of the minority students could speak Cantonese fluently as they born in Hong Kong, their ability of writing Chinese are comparatively low. Also, most of their parents are not good at written Chinese either. Therefore, their academic performance would be significantly affected. Meanwhile, some of the minority households are the low-income families which have fewer resources to support their children’s study, so that students may not able to attend tutorial classes to improve their Chinese, furthermore, obstructed them to enter the university (Erni and Leung, 2014:137). Apart from the limited family resources, the patriarchal beliefs of South Asia remains strong, the men are usually expected to be the ‘breadwinners’. Thus, parents would strongly encourage their sons to attain higher educational attainment to obtain the professional job with higher income (Ahmad, 2001: 144). Although parents would still encourage their daughters to obtain higher education level as a kind of investment , women are not preferred to participate in the workplace for a long time as they are expected to be a ‘homemaker’ traditionally (Ahmad, 2001:144-145). Therefore, they have lesser chances to