The rewards received by coworkers with the same qualifications are an important source of comparison for individuals in the workplace and can have a significant impact on them. According to social comparison theory (Festinger, 1954) and studies on how employees compare their returns to work with those of colleagues (Luna-Arocas and Tang, 2024; Pillinger, 2023), horizontal pay comparisons have become a central way for individuals to evaluate fairness within organizations.

When women in the workplace observe pay differences among colleagues with similar qualifications, these direct comparisons often raise concerns about distributive justice (Luna-Arocas and Tang, 2024). In the Chinese labor market, such concerns are particularly salient given the persistence of traditional gender role expectations and structural inequalities across employment sectors. Many women, despite holding similar educational backgrounds and professional responsibilities as their male colleagues, find themselves placed in lower-paying roles or excluded from key performance-based bonuses and promotion channels. This phenomenon is often reinforced by implicit organizational practices that reward male-dominated positions with higher visibility and evaluation advantages. As a result, women are more likely to experience stagnation in career advancement and to perceive a lack of institutional recognition for their contributions (Ma, 2025).

This unequal distribution creates a double challenge. On one hand, the feeling of relative deprivation caused by pay comparisons undermines the perception of fairness (Li, 2022). On the other hand, the positive relationship between perceived organizational fairness and job performance is weakened (Faeq and Ismael, 2022). As a result, a harmful cycle may emerge: perceived unfairness leads to lower motivation, which in turn leads to reduced performance.

Women in the workplace often face the challenge of time poverty, which stems from the ongoing struggle to balance professional and family responsibilities. In China, this issue is particularly pronounced due to the strong societal expectations placed on women to fulfill caregiving roles within the household. As work hours become increasingly fragmented and competitive pressures intensify in urban labor markets, many women find themselves juggling extended work commitments alongside responsibilities for child-rearing and elder care (Lu, 2024).

Although China has made significant strides in expanding educational and employment opportunities for women, the structural disadvantages they face in both the labor market and the family domain remain persistent. Women are more likely to be employed in lower-paid, less secure jobs, and simultaneously bear a disproportionate share of unpaid domestic labor (Clawson and Gerstel, 2014; Türkeli et al., 2023; Gadzali and Ausat, 2023). As a result, their career trajectories are frequently characterized by discontinuity and compromise. While the professional environment increasingly rewards long working hours and geographic mobility, many women must forgo such opportunities due to caregiving responsibilities, creating a fragmented pattern of career development similar to that observed in other contexts (Acker, 2006).

For Chinese women who have entered motherhood, the challenges often intensify. Balancing early child care with full-time employment can lead to role conflict, emotional strain, and a perceived lack of advancement opportunities. In some cases, the incompatibility between institutional expectations and family obligations prompts women to temporarily or permanently withdraw from the workforce (Sabellis and Schilling, 2013; Hirschman, 1970). These sacrifices—often unacknowledged in organizational structures—underscore the extent to which professional success for women still demands significant personal compromise (Bolton and Muzio, 2008).

Despite repeated efforts to legislate gender equality in the workplace, practical enforcement remains uneven. Reports continue to show that many women experience implicit discrimination (Triana et al., 2019), limited promotion pathways, and even harassment (Kim et al., 2020), further dampening their motivation to pursue upward mobility (Webber, 2019). Based on these conditions, this paper hypothesizes that when women are subjected to the dual pressures of work and family life, their motivation for career advancement tends to decline—thereby reinforcing the cycle of gender inequality.

Women’s career expectations are significantly shaped by gender differences, and in China, this influence is deeply embedded in the sociocultural and institutional fabric of the labor market. Chinese women often interpret their workplace experiences through a gendered lens, particularly in sectors where male dominance is structurally entrenched and organizational hierarchies reflect long-standing gender norms (Shymko et al., 2024). Although achievement motivation exists across genders, the relationship between aspiration and career advancement tends to differ, with women exhibiting more cautious or restrained expectations under the influence of workplace realities (Mendez and Crawford, 2002; Guoying, 2011).

Through processes of social comparison, many Chinese women perceive greater difficulty in accessing promotions or leadership roles compared to their male peers (Watts et al., 2015; Zhang and Basha, 2023). These perceptions are not unfounded; they are continuously reinforced by implicit and explicit gender stereotypes that inform hiring decisions, task assignments, and promotion standards (Wood, 2008; Heilman, 2012). Under such circumstances, women may internalize these constraints, leading to reduced self-confidence and lower expectations regarding their own career trajectories, especially in positions requiring assertiveness, visibility, or external networking.

Such internalized barriers are further exacerbated by limited access to resources that could counterbalance structural disadvantages. For instance, the narrow range of career strategies deemed socially acceptable for female managers in China limits their ability to build effective social capital (Zhu et al., 2016). This not only restricts upward mobility but also reinforces occupational segregation in many industries. Moreover, studies suggest that only a small proportion of women perceive themselves as having the same potential to attain senior positions as their male counterparts, highlighting a self-assessment gap that is shaped by organizational culture and institutional expectations (Elliott and Smith, 2004).

Gender-based disparities in career expectation formation are often rooted in early experiences and pre-employment socialization. Inequities in the labor market manifest even before career entry, as gendered expectations guide educational choices and initial job aspirations (Schweitzer et al., 2011). In the Chinese context, differences in age, education level, and income intersect with cultural norms to produce distinct labor market experiences and anticipations for men and women. Traditional gender stereotypes continue to serve as templates for defining professional roles, shaping how women see themselves within the broader career structure (Wei, 2011).

Based on this evidence, this paper proposes that gender plays a decisive role in shaping expectations for upward social mobility in China—not only through institutional practices and external constraints but also through the internalization of role expectations and societal norms.

According to social comparison theory, individuals engage in horizontal comparisons in the workplace to evaluate their relative standing within a group (Festinger, 1954). In the Chinese context, such comparisons often center on educational credentials, which serve not only as indicators of professional competence but also as key filters in institutional selection processes. Many professionals assess their own competitiveness by comparing their degrees, university backgrounds, and academic achievements with those of their colleagues, especially in sectors where formal qualifications are rigidly standardized.

Educational attainment continues to play a critical role in hiring and promotion within China’s increasingly credential-driven labor market. As observed in broader comparative studies, higher education may lead to greater job autonomy for women (Wu et al., 2021), and a strong academic background often serves as a proxy for productivity and potential (Habermalz, 2003). These dynamics are also evident in China, where elite universities and advanced degrees are often prerequisites for entry into high-paying or high-status roles, especially in public institutions and state-owned enterprises.

However, educational credentials alone do not guarantee upward mobility. In practice, the value of education is shaped by its alignment with institutional expectations, social capital, and family background. Some research has found that hiring for top- and upper-middle-level positions tends to favor candidates from economically privileged or elite backgrounds (Brieba and Herrera-Marín, 2025), a pattern increasingly visible in China’s urban job markets. Meanwhile, individuals from rural areas or with less prestigious degrees may find themselves excluded from career advancement opportunities, regardless of their actual ability.

These findings suggest that education level remains a powerful but selective mechanism for workplace mobility (Ropero-García, 2023). It not only influences how individuals compare themselves to others, but also determines their access to opportunity structures shaped by class, region, and institutional bias. In this way, educational attainment contributes both to the expansion and the reproduction of occupational hierarchies (Volkers et al., 2007).

Income levels and cost of living are both key factors influencing regional economic development. While there is a clear correlation between income and the cost of living, studies have found that both variables tend to increase with city size (Campbell and James, 2020). In the Chinese context, this pattern is especially prominent in first- and second-tier cities, where higher per capita incomes are often accompanied by significantly elevated living costs. Nonetheless, these urban centers remain attractive to job seekers due to the wider range of employment opportunities and more robust social infrastructure they offer (Patacchini and Zenou, 2006). As David Rusk once noted, “The worst neighborhoods ruin good plans.” In rapidly urbanizing China, major metropolitan areas such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen are typically better equipped to support income growth, provide diverse job opportunities, and deliver essential services such as housing and healthcare, further enhancing their appeal to the labor force (Squires and Kubrin, 2005).

Moreover, research shows that individuals’ career aspirations are strongly shaped by the opportunity structures embedded in urban environments. In China, where access to quality education, stable employment, and public services is highly stratified across regions, limited opportunities in smaller or less-developed cities often motivate individuals to strive for upward mobility through geographic relocation or intensified personal effort (Furlong et al., 1996). Empirical studies support the idea that upward mobility is more likely to occur in Chinese cities that are larger in population, well-connected by transportation, and characterized by lower income inequality and higher levels of educational attainment (Michelangeli and Türk, 2021). Furthermore, domestic research has demonstrated a positive relationship between upward mobility and local economic conditions such as high GDP growth and low unemployment rates, underscoring the importance of economic prosperity in shaping mobility outcomes and maintaining social stability in China (Chen et al., 2018).

This study examines Chinese women’s perceptions of upward social mobility by analyzing user-generated content from Zhihu, a leading knowledge-sharing platform in China. Comments were collected from the “Workplace” and “Career Development” sections, focusing on threads in which women discussed career challenges and professional aspirations. Data collection was conducted using Octopus, a domestically developed web-scraping software that enables automated extraction and de-duplication of platform content. ¹The initial dataset covers the period from January 1, 2022, to June 1, 2024, yielding a total of 4,043 raw comments.

To ensure sample relevance and reduce noise, several screening criteria were applied: (1) comments had to be authored by self-identified female users, as indicated by usernames, bios, or thread tags; (2) content had to pertain to career development, workplace experience, or mobility-related aspirations; (3) duplicate, irrelevant, or spam-like content was removed via keyword filtering and manual review. The final dataset included 4,043 valid comments.

It is important to note that Zhihu users tend to be younger, urban-based, and highly educated. While we did not explicitly control for occupation, age, or region due to data limitations, this demographic bias is acknowledged and discussed in the interpretation of results. Comments from students and early-career professionals were retained to reflect the platform’s core user group.

This research was approved by Fuzhou Yango University. All procedures involving data collection and analysis comply with the ethical standards and research integrity guidelines of the institution. As the data used in this study were publicly available on Zhihu, a Chinese knowledge-sharing platform, no personal or sensitive information was collected, and anonymity of users has been preserved throughout.

Before conducting topic modeling, we implemented a comprehensive preprocessing pipeline to ensure data quality and model validity (Zheng et al., 2015). The steps included:

The study employs the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model, a widely used unsupervised probabilistic model, to uncover latent thematic structures in the comment data. LDA assumes that each document (in this case, each comment) is composed of a mixture of topics, and each topic is characterized by a distribution over words.

LDA is a three-layer Bayesian model consisting of a document layer, a topic layer, and a word layer. Its core equation describes the conditional probability of a topic given a word:

P(c∣o)=P(c∣fi∣fj)=P(c∣fi)×P(c∣fj)=P(fi∣c)×P(c)P(fi)×P(fj∣c)×P(c)P(fj)

In this context, let o represent the overarching issue discussed on Zhihu, and c denote specific subtopics or thematic categories. The term f refers to high-frequency words extracted from the discourse. Thus, P(c∣f)indicates the likelihood that a piece of text belongs to topic c when it contains the word f, while P(f∣c)represents the likelihood of word f appearing within texts categorized as c, and P(f)refers to the word’s overall frequency in the corpus.

A machine learning model was employed to extract topic words, and after parameter tuning, the optimal number of topic categories was determined by calculating perplexity. Based on this metric, the best semantic extraction was achieved when the number of topics was set to six. The results of the topic word extraction are illustrated in Figure 1, and the identified themes are as follows:

Based on social comparison theory, this study explores the impact of upward social mobility by examining a representative case from the Chinese context. Specifically, the research analyzes 4,043 comments from Chinese women discussing workplace “involution” on the Zhihu platform, utilizing LDA topic modeling. The analysis reveals that Chinese women frequently engage in social comparisons when evaluating their career experiences, highlighting five critical dimensions that shape their perceived mobility: compensation and self-worth, educational opportunity, time-energy constraints, gender norms, and geographical barriers.

These findings contribute to the growing literature on gendered labor experiences by demonstrating how upward mobility is subjectively constructed through everyday discourse. Rather than treating institutional structures and personal agency as separate explanatory domains, this study integrates them through the lens of comparative reasoning, offering a more dynamic understanding of how women navigate professional inequality in contemporary China. In doing so, it advances the theoretical integration of social comparison and structuration frameworks while providing actionable insights for employers and policymakers seeking to create more equitable work environments.

Nevertheless, several limitations must be acknowledged. First, the data was collected from Zhihu between 2022 and 2024. As such, the findings reflect a specific temporal context and may not capture evolving sentiments in a rapidly shifting labor environment. Second, Zhihu users tend to be younger, urban-based, and more highly educated, leading to potential sampling bias. The discourse analyzed here thus represents a subset of China’s female labor force and may underrepresent the experiences of women from rural, older, or less-educated backgrounds. These demographic limitations should be considered when interpreting the generalizability of the results.

From a methodological perspective, while LDA modeling provides a scalable way to extract latent topics from large datasets, it has known limitations: it ignores word order, struggles with short texts, and is susceptible to overfitting. We mitigated these issues through rigorous preprocessing, topic validation, and multi-run stability checks. Still, future studies might consider using dynamic topic models or embedding-based methods (e.g., BERTopic) to improve interpretability and granularity.

In terms of future research, scholars could extend this study by incorporating multi-platform data to capture a broader demographic and more diverse narrative forms. Longitudinal analyses could also examine how women’s perceptions of upward mobility evolve across life stages or policy changes.

Beyond academia, our findings suggest several policy implications. Enterprises should consider conducting regular gender equity audits—assessing pay gaps, promotion rates, and workload allocation by gender—to detect and address structural biases. Governments and regional labor authorities could optimize talent retention policies by offering targeted housing support, childcare subsidies, or flexible work arrangements for professional women in second- and third-tier cities. Educational institutions may also revise career development programs to provide female students with early access to social capital and industry mentorship networks.

By recognizing these limitations and proposing actionable recommendations, this study serves as both a conceptual contribution and a practical reference for building more inclusive and responsive labor environments for women in China.

The findings of this study reveal that the mechanisms shaping women’s upward mobility in the workplace reflect both globally shared dynamics and distinctive national characteristics. On one hand, many of the challenges faced by Chinese women—such as gender bias, unequal pay, and work–family conflict—are widely observed across global contexts, underscoring the persistence of structural gender inequality (van Doorn, 2023). On the other hand, these obstacles are filtered through China’s unique institutional arrangements and cultural expectations, resulting in localized expressions and pathways of constraint.

In Western contexts, researchers have long theorized concepts such as the glass ceiling to describe the invisible barriers women face in career advancement. These studies argue that gender stereotypes, motherhood penalties, and embedded structural biases within organizations collectively form a web of hidden exclusion (Espinosa and Ferreira, 2022; Purcell et al., 2010). The results of this study’s LDA topic modeling align closely with these findings. Many female users voiced frustration with being marginalized during promotions, receiving lower performance evaluations, and bearing disproportionate emotional labor—all of which resonate with the structural gender injustices identified in global scholarship.

However, unlike many Western countries where legal protections against discrimination are institutionally supported and broadly enforced, China presents a contrasting scenario. While formal gender equality is guaranteed under the law, enforcement mechanisms remain limited in scope and effectiveness (Sun, 2025). Discriminatory practices are often embedded in informal organizational norms and manifest covertly across hiring, evaluation, and advancement processes. Moreover, Chinese women’s career trajectories are strongly shaped by expectations tied to family ethics, intergenerational obligations, and collectivist cultural values—factors that are less prominent in more individualistic Western settings.

In addition to these legal and organizational disparities, Chinese women face a set of uniquely institutional and cultural constraints in their pursuit of upward mobility:

First, the hukou (household registration) system significantly restricts geographic mobility and reinforces regional inequalities. Women from rural or lower-tier urban backgrounds—even those with high educational attainment—often encounter institutional barriers that limit their long-term career prospects in top-tier cities (Hung, 2022).

Second, housing affordability functions as a form of hidden exclusion. Due to high real estate costs, many newcomers to large cities opt to rent rather than buy property (Mu et al., 2024). However, the financial burden of living in major cities such as Shanghai is widely reported among female professionals. Numerous users noted that without parental support for down payments, they would be unable to sustain a long-term life or career in these urban centers. This reflects the strong dependency on intergenerational financial support and reveals the extent to which professional geographic mobility is conditioned by familial wealth (Cui and Ronald, 2024).

Moreover, intensified competition within China’s educational system adds another layer of pressure. On one hand, the growing emphasis on elite credentials has made degrees from prestigious institutions a de facto requirement for desirable positions. On the other hand, women are frequently expected to perform multiple roles simultaneously—being a productive employee, a caring mother, and a socially acceptable woman—leading to what many describe as “total life management” burdens.

While structural impediments to women’s workplace mobility are certainly not unique to China, the interaction of the hukou system, real estate pressures, parental support expectations, credentialism, and deep-rooted gender norms combine to create a context-specific configuration of constrained mobility. This study thus not only confirms global findings on gendered inequality but also offers a structure–agency perspective that captures the particularities of Chinese women’s workplace experiences.