Hello, I’m Jiang Lai, a university lecturer researching gender and public policy.

Before we formally begin, consider a few ordinary scenes.

A woman in her twenties interviews for a job. Her major fits and she ranks first on the written test. At the end, the interviewer casually asks: Are you married? When do you plan to have children?

A woman returns from maternity leave and finds that important projects are gradually no longer assigned to her. Everyone calls it consideration and care, but performance reviews and promotion tell another story.

A brother and sister have elderly parents who need care. With almost no family discussion, the duty is assumed to belong to the daughter. The brother sends money each month, and everyone feels the son has done his part.

These scenes are familiar. Past discussions have shown that they are not isolated “women’s experiences,” nor simply the result of bad luck, failure to fight, or choosing family.

In this series, we want to ask one further question:What institutions and policies make similar stories recur?

To explain why I see the issue this way, I want to begin with myself.

I married in 2003 at twenty-four, finished graduate school, and entered a public-sector workplace. At twenty-six, almost exactly the average childbearing age for Shanghai women then, I became pregnant and a mother. By the script society had written for a young woman—an elite degree, stable job, warm family, and lovely child—I completed everything on schedule. I also “perfectly” avoided two misogynistic labels then in vogue: “leftover woman” and “the third sex—the woman PhD.” Only years later did I realize that I escaped those labels not by doing something right, but through the luck of meeting society’s timetable for women.

At twenty-eight, I made a decision few around me understood: I applied for a part-time doctorate and, by chance, entered educational leadership. For three years, squeezed between being a mother, employee, and student, I studied women’s leadership. I wanted to know why women leaders remained so few and leadership so difficult for women. In 2011 my dissertation became the monograph Research on Women’s Leadership, the first Chinese book devoted to the subject and the starting point of my academic career.

Other programs have discussed “leftover women,” women PhDs, pressure to marry and have children, workplace ceilings, and the dilemmas of motherhood. I do not want to repeat them. I want to pull the camera back toward what shapes these conditions: policy.

You may think policy is too large and distant, especially here, for ordinary people to influence.

Consider the term “leftover woman,” whose origins younger people may not know. In 2007 it appeared in a report on the state of the Chinese language as a new social expression. It soon became pressure placed on many women: unmarried beyond a certain age, they were treated as people “left behind.” A complex life was compressed into one humiliating label.

The term’s fate later changed, and no single force changed it.Some challenged it at family tables, some argued with parents in matchmaking parks, and some mocked or rewrote it online. Scholars, media, and public debate repeatedly exposed its sexism.

Business also entered the process. In 2016, SK-II released an influential advertisement about young women pushed into urban matchmaking parks by anxious parents, the marriage market, and social judgment. It was brand marketing, but resonated because refusal had accumulated for years in women’s daily lives. Business sensed the shift and amplified it.

By 2017, China Women’s News had officially listed “leftover woman” as sexist language. A recorded neologism was questioned repeatedly and finally marked explicitly as discriminatory. Scholars and media analyzed it, women rejected it, and commercial communication amplified public feeling. Their motives and goals differed, but together they pushed the term to the point where people said, “We cannot keep talking this way.”

Most of us rarely draft laws, but we can help define problems: why a term should not be used, why humiliation should not be normalized, and why a habit defended as “everyone says it” must change.

Sustained expression, refusal, and renaming gradually shifted the boundary of public debate and influenced policy responses.Public policy never belongs only to a few. Once we treat it as our concern, it is already changing.

The program’s title pays tribute to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. A century later, the question is no longer merely whether a woman can have a room of her own, but whether she can leave it and enter the world.

After my dissertation was published, I thought I would remain on the path of women’s leadership. Soon, however, society’s language and the ideas behind it shifted.

In 2013 China introduced the selective two-child policy: a couple could have a second child if either spouse was an only child. It was the first major relaxation of birth policy in over thirty years. Alongside it, public discourse increasingly repeated that women must “balance career and family,” seize the “best childbearing age,” recognize that “breast milk is irreplaceable,” and celebrate “great maternal love.”

On the surface it was population policy, but it also readjusted women’s social role. It told every woman of childbearing age that her primary identity and life task were again being pulled toward motherhood.

I realized that women’s leadership and birth policy were two sides of the same issue. Paths into public life were narrowing while forces pushing women home were strengthening. Policy shaped both.

In 2014 I wrote about why the selective two-child policy lacked gender-impact assessment from the outset: why a birth policy directly affecting hundreds of millions of women’s bodies and careers had no dedicated procedure to assess its effects on women. I later studied its effect on women’s employment, shifting from how women enter the world of power to how policy assigns women their place.

I vividly remember attending an international conference on women’s leadership. After senior experts spent hours describing the abilities modern women still needed, the knowledge they must gain, and the need for endless study, I improvised when my turn came:

The words surprised even me, and I recognized two things.

First, my years studying women’s leadership concealed an assumption I had never noticed: women were not good enough and therefore needed cultivation and instruction. The opposite is true. From kindergarten through university and doctoral study, girls and women generally outperform boys and men academically. They are more diligent, disciplined, and broadly developed.They have not done too little; they have already done too much.

Second, at a deeper level—if society’s policies pull women toward motherhood, it is dishonest to keep promising that a little more effort and excellence will let them build careers, reach leadership, and become top talent.However hard they work, the system that truly matters remains.

In 2017 I visited Wellesley College, the renowned women’s college in the United States. I saw how more than a century had created a space for women. A student was not expected to become a certain kind of woman, but a certain kind of person: perhaps a chemist or engineer, diplomat or leader.

As Wellesley’s motto suggests, its students make a difference in the world. A later conversation will discuss the college and whether women’s colleges still matter.

Wellesley led me to change the question:not “How can women acquire leadership?” but “What institutional arrangements let women become leaders in public life?”In 2021 I published my second monograph, Leadership Development and Effectiveness in Women’s College Education.

In 2024, Professor Shen Yang of Shanghai Jiao Tong University and I published The New Era of Childbearing. It appears to study fertility, but every mother of one, two, or three children whom we recorded was or had been a working woman, maneuvering between family and society—moving back and forth between the room and the world.

One question stayed with me while writing. Since the new century began, women’s participation in higher education has risen sharply worldwide, especially in China. Women have been the majority of graduate admissions since 2009; by 2020 they exceeded half of both undergraduate and graduate students. This is the achievement of Chinese women’s collective effort and one of the era’s proudest advances.

Yet urban working women still face a gender income gap of roughly 10 to 15 percent, even among similarly educated groups with comparable starting points; women’s relative position in the labor market also continues to decline. Using International Labour Organization data, Zhang Dandan found that China’s global ranking for labor-force participation among women aged 15–64 fell from eleventh in 2000 to fifty-first in 2022。

After traveling through birth-policy research and returning to this question, I became certain that the answer cannot again be “women must work harder.”

We must look in policy design, institutional arrangements, and society’s assumptions about “women’s work.”

Let me begin with a term many may never have heard.

For more than forty years, China’s core language of women’s development has beenthe “Four Selfs”: self-respect, self-confidence, self-reliance, and self-improvement.

The Four Selfs can be traced to the Fifth National Women’s Congress in 1983. The Sixth Congress in 1988 established today’s formulation and wrote it into the charter of the All-China Women’s Federation. For forty years, from federation documents to the general provisions of the Law on the Protection of Women’s Rights and Interests and the Thirteenth Congress in 2023, these four ideas have remained central.

None is wrong. Everyone should possess self-respect, confidence, reliance, and strength. Yet placed in real conditions, they create unease.

Notice that the subject of every term is the woman herself.None says what society must do for her. Responsibility for change is placed entirely on women.

Yet in reality—

But if the rules were never designed to serve every group, even perfect self-respect, confidence, reliance, and strength only let women contest a predeterminedly unfair match on someone else’s field.Even if they compete more fiercely and win, the hand called policy remains.

I have become increasingly certain:real change cannot demand only that women become stronger. Women must enter, at scale and in organized ways, the positions that define rules and design the field.How is public policy made, and by whom? Who is present and absent? Are there enough women in legislatures, decision-making circles, and important appointed positions?

This is not about whether women should compete harder, marry, or have children.Only when enough women help make the rules can the rules be redesigned. Only when gender genuinely enters public policy can the conditions for women’s “free choice” exist.

That is why this program is a global survey of policy and power. This is public, not private.

Such a global survey also needs the dimension of time.

Let me begin with an observation.

Almost every historical era and civilization occasionally produced one or two women with political power: Cleopatra in ancient Egypt, Wu Zetian in China, Elizabeth I in England, and Catherine II in Russia.

Almost all acquired power in the same way: through family. She was an emperor’s daughter, a king’s wife, or the matriarch of a dynasty. Her power came not because public life opened its doors, but from her position in a particular room. She was a woman in the room, not a woman in the world.

This continued into modern times.Even in the late twentieth century, from Indira Gandhi in India and Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan to Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Myanmar, many countries’ first women leaders reached power through husbands, fathers, or families.

In most countries, public life began opening to women as a group through their own education, careers, and political participation only decades ago: twenty or thirty years in some, no more than sixty or seventy in others.

On the scale of human history, women’s access to power through public life is extremely young.It is an experiment begun only by recent generations. Whether it continues, reverses, or changes direction remains unsettled.

That is why time matters so much here:we are not walking a completed road. It is still being laid; no forward step is inevitable, and every step may be reversed.

How far has this unfinished road reached? Consider three sets of scenes.

First, places that have traveled far.Iceland has the world’s smallest gender gap, has elected an openly lesbian woman as head of government, and legalized same-sex marriage early. Rwanda, devastated by war, reshuffled power through constitutional quotas during reconstruction and became the first country where women held more than half of legislative seats; it remains the world leader。They did not wait for development to raise women’s status naturally. They used institutions to alter power directly.

Second, places that appear to be trying but remain stuck.Japan introduced its gender-equal society policy more than twenty years ago, yet women still hold only about 15 percent of lower-house seats; in 2025 Japan gained its first woman prime minister—but as later episodes show, one woman reaching office does not automatically bring a gender agenda with her.

In neighboring South Korea, fertility has fallen to the world’s lowest level. Some young women have adopted a stance summarized as the “Four Nos”: no dating, marriage, children, or sex, answering injustice in public life by withdrawing completely from private life.

Well-educated young women in China’s largest cities repeatedly hesitate between having children or not, marrying or not, going outward or retreating. They appear to have the most choices, yet behind each lies prolonged calculation and exhausted compromise.

Third are places tightening or moving backward.Saudi Arabia lifted its ban on women driving only in 2018. For years, adult women needed a male guardian’s consent to travel abroad, obtain passports, or marry; the guardianship system controlled many major life decisions. After the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan in 2021, every girl over twelve was barred from secondary education, making it the only country in the twenty-first century to strip girls’ educational rights by law。

The United States belongs here too. In 2022 the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, returning a half-century of abortion rights to individual states overnight。Regression does not occur only in places we consider “backward.”

Together, the three scenes teach something crucial:gender progress is not a straight line from backward to advanced, but a map that can advance, stall, branch, or reverse at any time.

Nordic countries have conducted institutional experiments, while East Asia faces pressures that are similar but not identical—they are not earlier and later points on one road, but different institutional choices under different historical conditions.Women in some places still seek rights that should have existed a century ago; elsewhere they ask, “Having come this far, is it enough?”

Each episode therefore begins with “When...” Each “when” marks a concrete policy moment: when Sweden required fathers by law to take parental leave; when South Korea spent two trillion encouraging births and failed; when China extended maternity leave from 98 to 158 days; when America overturned Roe v. Wade. We will lay out these moments one by one. None occurred naturally: people pushed, paid a price, and chose or rejected a path.

“When...” reminds us:progress is never delivered automatically by time.

Finally, a brief outline in four parts.

Part One, Women in Institutions, follows a woman through education, work, organizations, relationships, childbearing, and care. We examine the institutions she meets at each threshold and how they shape her.

Part Two compares gender policy globally. We look at how countries use cash, public services, retirement and pension systems, budgets, and law to address inequality across women’s lives. Facing the same difficulty, humanity has tried many solutions.

Part Three asks why countries chose different paths: why the Nordic countries followed one route, continental Europe another, East Asia became trapped in a similar predicament, and America chose a very different way.

Part Four, East Asia’s Present Coordinates and Future Forks, returns home after circling the world. Where does East Asia stand as ultralow fertility, heavy family duties, women’s early exit from work, and a care crisis converge? As aging and artificial intelligence arrive together, where will the future’s forks lead?

I will also include conversations with friends and scholars from different fields, bringing policy down from cold provisions to particular people and lives.

Finally, I will give you a method for comparing policy. It has three moves, repeated in every episode.

First, global comparison.Treat the world as one enormous policy laboratory. Different countries answer the same problem in radically different ways, often producing radically different social consequences.Comparison shows that our present way is neither the only possible life nor natural and unchangeable. Others chose another road, proving that several roads always existed.

Second, looking through the gender lens.Many policies sound neutral and equal. Look one layer deeper and you often find assumptions about what men and women should do. A gender lens identifies and exposes assumptions hidden beneath a neutral surface.

Third, policy questioning.This is the method’s core: we do not ask, “Why is she like this?” We ask, “What policies leave her no alternative?” Pursue these questions and behind an apparently personal choice you find a long chain of institutions.

You may now expect the program to say whom China should emulate, how births should be encouraged, how women’s leadership should be developed, and what the right answer is.

I must be honest:this program will not offer a ready-made, rapid answer.

Years of research have made me certain:more dangerous than having no answer is answering too quickly.Any claim that Chinese women “should do this,” fertility “must be encouraged that way,” or women’s leadership “must be cultivated like this” uses a simple story to conceal a more complex reality.