Abstract
Despite sustained policy efforts to increase men’s participation in early childhood education (ECE), male representation in China remains persistently low. Existing scholarship has largely explained men’s entry into feminised professions through stable motivational typologies derived from Western contexts, emphasising individual choice, vocational orientation, or labour market adjustment. Less attention has been paid to how men’s career trajectories unfold over time, particularly in socio-cultural settings where educational stratification and moral expectations surrounding masculinity shape opportunity structures.
Drawing on qualitative data from 25 semi-structured interviews across six nurseries in Northern China, this study examines how male nursery teachers enter, remain in, and exit ECE. The findings demonstrate that entry is rarely driven by intrinsic vocation. Instead, it reflects constrained agency shaped by Gaokao performance, classed educational pathways, and restricted labour market options. Post-entry trajectories are negotiated through economic pressures, organisational conditions, and culturally embedded expectations of male breadwinning and legitimacy. While some men develop intrinsic commitment over time, retention is typically conditional upon stability and institutional security. Exit often functions as a strategy for restoring economic viability or masculine legitimacy rather than rejecting care work itself.
The paper makes three contributions. First, it reframes male entry into feminised work as structurally conditioned rather than preference-driven. Second, it conceptualises agency as culturally moralised, embedded in Confucian norms of responsibility and social respectability. Third, it develops a dynamic, dual-stage typology of male career trajectories that integrates and extends established Western frameworks within a temporally sensitive and contextually grounded model.
By situating men’s participation in ECE within broader regimes of inequality, morality, and institutional structure, this study advances global debates on gender, work, and organisation, offering a more contextually nuanced understanding of masculinities in feminised professions.