Racing Against a Career-Fertility Countdown: The Prospective Motherhood Penalty and Gendered Ageism in China's Workplace

Abstract

This study examines the prospective motherhood penalty encountered by women white-collar workers of childbearing age, regardless of their childbearing status, in China's non-state-owned enterprises. Drawing on 63 qualitative interviews with women employees, selected from a broader study of 85 participants, it explores how women subjectively experience, emotionally negotiate, and strategically respond to anticipated discrimination based on reproductive potential. I introduce the concept of the Career-Fertility Countdown—a socially constructed and culturally enforced temporal regime that compresses women's career advancement and childbearing into a narrow window of acceptability. To navigate these multifaceted pressures, women adopt diverse strategies: those intending to have children engage in strategic timing and planning, whereas those determined to remain childfree—particularly lesbian women—engage in strategic gender performance and identity signaling. The Career-Fertility Countdown framework highlights how time, gender, and organizational expectations interact to shape embodied pressures and identity strategies, particularly under China's overwork-intensive and ageist labor regime. Drawing on narratives from women of varied backgrounds, this study contributes to feminist understandings of how reproductive timelines are internalized and negotiated in competitive workplaces, where prospective motherhood becomes a source of precariousness for all women. The findings also emphasize the importance of incorporating age-related cultural paradigms when studying women's barriers in the workplace. Such paradigms may exacerbate tensions between work and family aspirations and amplify gender discrimination for women at particular career stages.