The Study of Gender Imbalance in Teacher-Training Programmes in Higher-Education in Mainland China: Why and What to do

The serious imbalance in the proportion of male and female teachers in basic-level schools has long been a highly visible phenomenon and become increasingly obvious in recent years, with much more female teachers than the male ones in most cases. According to the 2010-2019 data from the Ministry of Education (MOE), nearly 70.08% of teachers in basic-level schools are female. This disproportion has led to academically and mentally negative impacts on students in terms of development of interpersonal communication, students' personality as well as students' creativity. Based on these, there is a necessity to balance the gender distribution in teacher-training programmes of higher-education as they are still the main source of teacher's pool. However, despite the fact that gender imbalance in teacher-training majors has been aggregating, very limited articles recently are published that focus on this issue, and if any, lacking in systematic and comprehensive approach to probe the rationale behind gender imbalance in normal universities and provide relevant policy implications. Resorting to the Developmental Ecological Model, this article adopts literature analysis method to identify the ideological, social, family and individual factors that affect the imbalanced gender distribution in teacher-training programmes in higher-education in mainland China from the dimensions of macrosystem, mesosystem, and microsystem. Results show that uneven gender distribution is closely related to social factors including traditional perception towards gender and occupations, the universal recognition of female teachers' strengths by school and the society, the occupational characteristics of teachers as well as the income and occupational competitiveness of teachers, with all of which impeding the determination of male students to enroll in the teaching-related majors. Lastly, targeting recommendations are put forward to help solve the problem, comprising holding social awareness campaigns, adjusting recruitment strategies, improving Curriculum and Program design, offering more career services and building mechanism for monitoring and evaluation.