Still Girls Help Girls? Gender Congruence, Social Stereotypes, and Discretion

• In Event: Lightning Round: Feminism, Gender, and the State in Japan, Korea, and China

Abstract

How do female street-level bureaucrats treat female clients with unfavorable social status characteristics? In China, some emerging O2O massage apps, despite explicitly prohibiting sex trade, witness a clandestine proliferation of pornographic services under the guise of ‘door-to-door massage for beautiful women’. Regulatory gaps in those O2O apps have given rise to gray-market sex trades characterized by high spatial confidentiality. This puts street-level bureaucrats at the forefront of adjudicating illegal liability in cases involving sexual assault against massagists or dispute related to suspected sex trade. Will street-level bureaucrats, especially female ones, lend a helping hand to female massagists who are double-oppressed by patriarchy and capitalism? Or choosing to punish them severely as the main culprits undermining social morality? Scholarly perspectives on this issue also exhibit divergence.
Female massagists have complex social identities. On the one hand, they are mostly women, while representative bureaucracy literature suggests that female street-level bureaucrats may favor or actively represent female clients in gendered policy areas, particularly those related to salient women’s issues like sexual assault. The gray-market sex trade scenario examined in this study is tightly linked to these gendered policy areas. On the other hand, female massagists also bear a socially stigmatized identity. In China, their social image has long been unfairly tarnished with the pejorative label of 'sex workers'. Street-level bureaucracy literature on stereotyping has argued that bureaucrats tend to treat clients harshly and hierarchically based on social categorization leading to biased judgments towards disadvantaged clients. Labeling female massagists as sex workers influences bureaucrats' decision-making, often leading to negative attitudes and victim-blaming. So which mechanism, discrimination or representation, explains differences in street-level bureaucrats' decisions to treat clients sharing similar socio-demographic backgrounds with them? And which one would dominate in a conflicting scenario? While the theoretical significance of this issue is noted by scholarship, empirical investigations addressing the controversy remain scarce in existing literature. Notably, these studies frequently overlook the nuanced intricacies of the social identities of clients.
My study aims to focus on the gray-market sex trade law enforcement scenes, investigating the extent to which the discretionary decision-making of street bureaucrats, especially female ones, is influenced by the gender congruence with clients or by stereotypes towards clients? I seek to contribute to the ongoing debate between representative bureaucracy theory and street-level stereotyping theory regarding how bureaucrats interact with minority clients who share similar demographic characteristics, and to provide further empirical evidence on social identity differences within female groups during active representation for gender.
I propose to employ an online vignette experiment as a research methodology, offering a feasible approach for investigating sensitive issues characterized by high social desirability bias. Given the challenges in accessing police officers, particularly females, I will utilize purposive sampling. Questionnaires will be distributed to police officers in various regions in China, with a focus on female officers. The anticipated sample size is approximately 500. The questionnaire is designed to primarily gather data on four key variables: gender congruence, social stereotypes, discretion in decision-making, and various covariates from both individual and organizational levels. Furthermore, based on the current research landscape, I anticipate three key conclusions:1) In gender policy area, gender congruence between street-level bureaucrats and clients will influence preferences in discretionary decision-making. Specifically, female bureaucrats tend to treat female customers more leniently. 2) In situations where symbols of discrimination are salient, street-level bureaucrats are inclined to treat socially stigmatized groups more harshly due to social stereotypes. 3) In scenarios like gray-market sex trade, involving both gender policies and salient symbols of discrimination, the discretionary decision-making of female street-level bureaucrats is influenced by gender congruence and social stereotypes. Notably, stereotypes play a more significant role.
In terms of implications for practice, this study is expected to gain insights for sufficiently understand the gender or societal biased decision-making praxis of street-level bureaucrats, provide policy suggestions for the public practitioners to effectively supervise emerging business formats related to gray-market sex trade, safeguard the rights of vulnerable societal groups, and improve grassroots law enforcement practices.

Author

• Junqi Zhang, Tsinghua University