Structural Inequality in High-Quality Employment Among Chinese Youth: Spatial Differentiation, Gender Disparities, and Mechanisms of Educational Mismatch

Abstract China’s youth employment challenge has increasingly shifted from employment quantity to employment quality. This study examines structural inequality in youth employment quality through three interconnected dimensions: spatial differentiation, gender disparities, and educational mismatch. Guided by labor-market segmentation theory, it develops a macro–meso–micro framework and combines provincial panel data for 30 provinces from 2013 to 2021, China Family Panel Studies data from the 2016 and 2022 waves, and China Labor-force Dynamics Survey data from 2018. Results show persistent spatial clustering of youth employment quality, with higher levels concentrated in eastern coastal provinces. Gender disparities are strongly distributional and increasingly concentrated in medium- and high-quality employment; decomposition results indicate that unequal returns, rather than differences in observed endowments, account for most of the gap. Educational mismatch operates through differentiated channels: recruitment-based overeducation is associated with lower objective employment quality, whereas competency-based mismatch is more strongly related to lower job satisfaction. Overall, regional opportunity structures, gendered reward mechanisms, and education–job mismatch jointly shape inequality in youth employment quality.