Gender and Work: Online Job Platforms of the Chinese Ethnic Economy

ABSTRACT Chinese immigrants in the United States have primarily relied on co-ethnic networks and formal labor market intermediaries to seek work in the ethnic economy, but online platforms have gained increasing significance. I conduct a qualitative content analysis of 145,986 job posts created between July 2019 and August 2022 for the restaurant and nail salon industry on a Chinese-language online platform, with a focus on the manifestation of gender roles. Advertisers communicate norms of masculinity and femininity through explicit requirements for gender, desired traits, and descriptions of working conditions. In the restaurant industry, a gendered division of space is imposed, requiring female workers for front-of-house positions and male workers for back-of-house positions, with a stoic and hardworking working-class masculinity emphasized for the latter. Nail salons that require more intimate customer interactions are more likely to explicitly require women, drawing on gender norms that hold women to higher standards of emotional labor and attention to detail. Salon advertisements often included information on the racial or socioeconomic makeup of the customer base or the salon’s neighborhood. The findings extend our understanding of digital labor market intermediaries in the ethnic labor market, as well as how symbolic boundaries of gender are transposed from offline to online contexts.