Emotional Labour and Misogyny: a general look at gender differences among teachers in Chinese high schools

Abstract

Emotional labour and misogyny have been studied in the gender field for decades. Numerous studies focused on the association of the two subjects and education industry in the western world respectively, while little research of such topics has been done in the eastern world context. This study took a step to examine the gender differences of high school teachers’ emotional labour in mainland China by reviewing previous literature and conducting interviews with teachers and students at a school located southeast China. The result found that misogyny is an essential factor causing different emotional labour contents between genders. Yet the consequences of this difference can be both positive and negative due to the varying types of emotional labour, and the detailed impacts are discussed. This study results also suggested that improvements of gender equality in classrooms, especially regarding teachers’ emotional labour, are crucial and urgent to be made for both teachers’ well-beings and students’ learning quality.