While doing career planning for my girlfriend, I generated this report. Reading it as I went, I found it rather surreal.

Author: Koutian Wu; GitHub: ktwu01

Research date: April 2026

Field: career development x gender studies x cross-cultural comparison

Research object type: concept

I. A One-Sentence Definition

In China and the US, “a job suitable for women that is easy and pleasant, requiring neither drinking at business dinners nor walking on eggshells around others’ moods,” this seemingly simple need actually reflects two completely different workplace power structures, gender cultures, and economic development paths.

II. Longitudinal Analysis: Two Parallel Lines, the Century-Long Evolution of Female Career Choices in China and America

The US Line: From Rosie the Riveter to the Remote Work Revolution

The Door Opened by War (1940s-1950s)

It all starts with a poster.

In 1943, the US government launched its famous propaganda poster “We Can Do It!”, depicting a woman with rolled-up sleeves flexing her bicep, calling on women to enter factories and fill the labor gap left by men who had gone to war. She has a name: Rosie the Riveter. During World War II, about six million American women flooded into manufacturing, aviation, and munitions factories, fields previously completely dominated by men.

But the second half of this story is not so romantic. When the war ended, men came home and women were “invited” back into the kitchen. Between 1945 and 1947, large numbers of women workers in manufacturing were laid off, and public opinion quickly turned, your battlefield should be the home. In the 1950s America, the “ideal life” of a middle-class white woman was a suburban house, two kids, and a washing machine. Betty Friedan would later call this “the problem that has no name” in The Feminine Mystique (1963), an unspeakable emptiness.

The core contradiction of this era: women had proven they could do any job, but the social structure was not yet ready to accept that fact.

Law and Awakening (1960s-1970s)

In 1963, the Equal Pay Act was passed. In 1964, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act brought gender discrimination within the prohibited scope. In 1972, Title IX prohibited gender discrimination in institutions receiving federal funds, which not only changed athletics but profoundly changed women’s access to higher education.

These laws did not fall from the sky. Behind them was the entire wave of feminism in the 1960s: NOW (National Organization for Women) was founded in 1966, Gloria Steinem launched Ms. magazine, and countless women took to the streets fighting for abortion rights, workplace equality, and domestic violence legislation.

Legal changes directly opened a door: women began entering, on a large scale, careers previously considered “men’s territory.” In 1970, the US female labor force participation rate was about 43 percent; by 1980 that number jumped to 52 percent. Female lawyers, female doctors, female engineers, still few, but every one was a trailblazer.

The keyword of this stage is “access,” earning the right of entry. As for whether it was pleasant once you got inside, that is a question for the next stage.

The Glass Ceiling Era (1980s-2000s)

Women entered the workforce but quickly found a ceiling overhead.

In 1986, the Wall Street Journal first used the term “glass ceiling” to describe the invisible barrier to women’s advancement in corporate hierarchies. You cannot see it, but you hit it. By 2000, women made up 47 percent of the US labor force, but only 2 of the Fortune 500 CEOs were women. The leap from middle management to the executive suite became the hardest fault line to cross.

This era also gave birth to a typical American dilemma, the illusion of “having it all.” Society told women: you can simultaneously have a successful career and a happy family. But the reality is that the US has no federal paid maternity leave law (still an outlier among developed countries today), childcare is expensive (a year of daycare for one child costs more than college tuition in many states), and in dual-income households women still do a far disproportionate share of housework.

Sheryl Sandberg’s 2013 book Lean In became, to some extent, the best footnote to this dilemma: she told women to lean in more bravely, seize opportunities, and not limit themselves. Critics pointed out, however, that when the system itself is unfair, an individual’s “leaning in” cannot solve structural problems. Anne-Marie Slaughter, in her earthshaking 2012 Atlantic article “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” pushed back directly against the “have it all” narrative with her own experience of resigning from the State Department to return home and care for her teenage son.

In this stage, a new type of “female-friendly job” began to take shape: not which jobs “allow” women to do them, but which jobs allow women to maintain career development while juggling family. The seeds of flexible hours and remote work appeared, but were far from mainstream.

Silicon Valley’s Dual Narrative (2010s)

The tech industry is a contradictory arena for women.

On one hand, Silicon Valley looks like the most “progressive” place, flat management, open offices, free lunch, yoga rooms, no suits. It lacks the old-boy club posturing of traditional industries (at least on the surface); technical ability is the hard currency. Google, Facebook, and Apple competed to promote their diversity initiatives, each publishing their gender diversity reports.

On the other hand, the depth of the tech industry’s gender problem was exposed during this decade by one explosive event after another.

In 2014, the “Gamergate” affair exposed a deeply entrenched misogyny tradition in tech culture. In February 2017, former Uber engineer Susan Fowler published the blog post “Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber,” detailing the sexual harassment she suffered at Uber and HR’s systematic cover-up. The post directly led to CEO Travis Kalanick’s fall and Uber’s comprehensive cultural reform. That same year, Google engineer James Damore wrote an internal memo claiming the low proportion of women in tech was due to “biological differences,” causing an uproar before he was fired. This memo, called the “Google memo,” remains a landmark event in any discussion of gender bias in tech.

Then came #MeToo.

In October 2017, Harvey Weinstein’s sexual assault scandal was exposed simultaneously by the New York Times and the New Yorker. The “Me Too” slogan, started by Tarana Burke in 2006, spread through social media like a tsunami, Alyssa Milano’s tweet received more than 500,000 replies within 24 hours. Although the movement originated in Hollywood, its impact quickly extended to every industry. In tech, executives at dozens of companies were forced out over sexual harassment allegations. More importantly, #MeToo drove a series of substantive institutional changes: stricter anti-harassment policies, anonymous reporting channels, independent investigation mechanisms, and the abolition of mandatory arbitration clauses.

But interestingly, #MeToo also brought an unexpected side effect. In 2019, a LeanIn.org and McKinsey survey showed that 60 percent of male managers said they were more reluctant to have one-on-one interactions with female colleagues after #MeToo, fearing misunderstandings. This “male avoidance” phenomenon (some jokingly call it the “Pence Rule,” because former Vice-President Pence said he would not dine alone with other women unless his wife was present) has, in some companies, led to women being excluded from informal social networks and mentoring opportunities. You want to protect yourself from harassment, and you end up losing the crucial professional contacts for career development.

COVID and the Remote Work Revolution (2020s)

The pandemic of 2020 unexpectedly became a watershed for women’s career development.

Bad news first: in the early pandemic, women’s unemployment spiked. In April 2020, nearly 11.5 million women in the US lost their jobs, because women were overrepresented in the industries hardest hit by the pandemic (retail, food service, hospitality). At the same time, school closures forced large numbers of mothers to exit the labor force to take on childcare responsibilities. Data from the National Women’s Law Center shows that from February 2020 to January 2021, 2.5 million more women than men net-left the labor force. Some called this the “she-cession.”

But good news followed: the widespread adoption of remote work fundamentally reshaped the definition of “what a good job is.”

Before the pandemic, only about 5.7 percent of US full-time employees worked fully remotely. By 2023, that number settled around 25-30 percent, and hybrid work covered more than 50 percent of knowledge workers. Stanford professor Nicholas Bloom’s research shows remote work saves employees an average of 70 minutes of commuting per day, of which about 40 percent is used for more work and 60 percent for personal life, which matters especially for women bearing more family responsibility.

McKinsey’s 2024 Women in the Workplace report shows flexible work arrangements have become a top-three consideration when women choose an employer, ahead of salary growth and promotion opportunities. 83 percent of surveyed women said flexible work was “very important” or “extremely important” to them.

Why is remote work especially important to women? Because it directly addresses the core pain point faced by American women: commuting time is released to become time for family care, flexible scheduling makes school drop-off and pickup stop being an impossible mission, and the removal of geographic constraints lets women in low-cost-of-living regions access high-paying jobs in big cities. More subtly, it weakens the physical carrier of office politics, when you no longer bump into people in the office hallway, many implicit power interactions disappear.

By 2025, a new trend has become clear: women’s participation in the creator economy and gig economy has grown significantly. Goldman Sachs estimates the creator economy reached $250 billion in 2024. About 87 percent of Etsy sellers are women. On YouTube and TikTok, female creators dominate verticals like beauty, parenting, education, and health. On freelance platforms like Upwork, the number of female freelance writers, designers, and virtual assistants keeps growing rapidly.

This is not just a change in how one is employed, but a reconstruction of power relations. When you do not need to sit in an office being judged by your supervisor’s eyes, when your income comes from multiple clients rather than one boss, when your core competitiveness is portable skills rather than an intracompany network, the problem of “walking on eggshells” is structurally dissolved.

The China Line: From “Iron Girls” to Xiaohongshu Bloggers

The Rise and Fall of “Half the Sky” (1949-1978)

“Times are different, men and women are all the same.”

Mao Zedong’s words established the tone for women’s employment in New China. But before applauding, read them in context, they are worth pondering.

After 1949, China accomplished something rare at the ideological level: turning women’s entry into the labor market from a “right” into an “obligation.” Iron Girls, “March 8th Red Banner” pacesetters, female tractor drivers, these images were not just propaganda but real large-scale social engineering. “Women hold up half the sky” was not a slogan but a policy. Female workers in the cities and female commune members in the countryside were all mobilized into the production system. By the late 1970s, China’s female labor force participation rate reached about 80 percent, an extremely high level globally.

But there is a subtle paradox here.

This “gender equality” was granted from the top down, not fought for bottom-up by women. China never experienced an independent feminist movement like America’s 1960s, no Gloria Steinem-style public intellectual, no large-scale street protests, no “My body, my choice” slogan. Whether you went to the factory or the farmland was not your choice; it was decided by the organization.

Equality existed; choice did not.

And this equality had boundaries, equal at the grassroots worker level, but the top of the power structure remained male-dominated. There has never been a woman in the Politburo Standing Committee, a tradition that persists to this day. Within local leadership teams, women tend to oversee “soft” fields like education, health, and culture, while “hard” fields like the economy, industry, and public security are almost entirely male territory.

This “granted equality” also has an aftereffect: it did not cultivate a “consciousness of rights.” When you are used to the model of “do whatever the top tells you,” you are less likely to develop the thought “I have the right to refuse.” This psychological undertone would resurface decades later in another form, when faced with being pressured to drink at the dinner table or being PUA’d at work, many women’s first reaction is endurance rather than resistance.

The Shockwave of the Market Economy (1978-2000s)

Reform and opening up was the first great turning point in the career narrative of Chinese women.

Marketization means “efficiency first,” and in a company’s efficiency calculations, women suddenly became “expensive,” they can get pregnant, take maternity leave, and get distracted caring for family. In the planned-economy era, these costs were borne by the state, and companies did not worry about them. But now, every labor cost had to be absorbed by the company itself.

In the state-owned enterprise (SOE) reform of the 1990s, the consequences of this logic were laid bare. Large numbers of SOE workers were laid off, and women were laid off at significantly higher rates than men. “4050 personnel” (female laid-off workers over 40 and male over 50) became a proper noun, but numerically women’s pain was sharper. Meanwhile, hiring conditions of “men only” or “men preferred” began appearing brazenly in corporate recruitment, even though the Labor Law explicitly forbids them, nobody enforced it.

At the same time, two new forces entered China’s workplace map.

The first: foreign companies. From the 1990s to the early 2000s, the expansion of multinational corporations in China brought a brand-new workplace culture. The HR systems of Fortune 500 foreign firms, standardized recruitment processes, clear promotion tracks, relatively transparent compensation structures, anti-harassment policies, held enormous appeal for Chinese women. “Going to a foreign company” became one of the most ideal career paths for educated young Chinese women.

Why? Because foreign firms’ rules were relatively clear: promotions depended on KPIs rather than how much you drank with your leader. Year-end evaluations had clear criteria rather than “the leader feels your attitude is not positive enough.” No need to “liven up the atmosphere” at dinner banquets. Of course, foreign firms had their own problems (the glass ceiling existed for Chinese women too), but in that era, they offered a “civilized” alternative.

The second: the internet. Alibaba was founded in 1999, Baidu in 2000, and Tencent, JD.com, and ByteDance rose in succession. The internet industry created many new job types, product managers, operations, designers, programmers. These jobs are characterized by relatively objective evaluation standards (data speaks), a young culture (no baggage of seniority), and online work content (reducing the need for offline social entertaining).

But the internet also brought 996. This is another form of “walking on eggshells”: you do not have to drink at dinner banquets, but you have to reply to your leader’s WeChat at all hours; you do not have to pledge loyalty over liquor, but you have to prove “wolf culture” with your hours. In 2019, the 996.ICU project went viral on GitHub globally, and in that discussion the gender dimension was always underappreciated: 996 hits women far harder than men because women still bear a disproportionate share of family responsibility. A male programmer working overtime until midnight can go home and crash; a female programmer working overtime until midnight may still have to prepare her child’s lunch for the next day.

The Dinner Table: The Invisible Entry Threshold of China’s Workplace

To understand the weight of the need for “no drinking required,” you must first understand what the dinner table really is in Chinese business culture.

The dinner table is not just a place to drink. It is a stage for enacting power, a loyalty test ground, and an informal decision-making space.

Who toasts first, who holds their glass lower, who downs it in one gulp, who only sips, every gesture is an encoding of power relations. In many industries (especially government relations, real estate, traditional manufacturing, finance), the dinner table is the real decision-making venue. Contracts are not signed in meeting rooms but sealed at the dinner table. Relationships are not built over email but in “heart-to-heart” talk after the third glass of baijiu.

This culture has deep historical roots. China’s “guanxi” (relationship) culture has been studied in academia for decades; it is an informal social capital network based on favors, face, and reciprocity. The dinner table is the core ritual for building and maintaining relationships. Not showing up is not a matter of “not drinking” but of “not giving face,” “not being part of the circle,” “not being trustworthy.”

For women, the dinner table is a double trap.

The first trap: if you do not drink, you are not giving face, not fitting in, “putting on airs.” In a relationship-driven business culture, this means you get no deals, no promotions, and are excluded from the core decision circle.

The second trap: if you do drink, then as a woman, the risks you bear at the dinner table are far greater than a man’s. Getting drunk and losing composure is the least of it; the true fear is being harassed or even sexually assaulted after being coaxed into drinking. Alcohol weakens self-protection ability, and the power asymmetry at the table (usually a leader or client urging the drink) makes refusal even harder.

The August 2021 Alibaba incident blew this long-standing gray zone into the national spotlight.

The event itself: a female Alibaba employee was asked by her direct supervisor to travel to Jinan on a business trip to drink with a client. After being drunk at a KTV, she was groped by the client. Her supervisor, an employee at P7 level, then entered her hotel room four times and was suspected of sexual assault. After her complaints to HR and leaders at all levels went nowhere, she printed fliers and publicly asked for help in the company cafeteria.

The nationwide reaction: more than 1.5 million related discussion posts emerged within days. The topic was not just this one case but the entire Chinese workplace drinking culture and the absence of anti-harassment mechanisms. Alibaba was forced to announce three measures: conduct employee rights protection training, formulate “Anti-Sexual Harassment Action Guidelines,” and crucially, “unconditionally support employees refusing to drink at business dinners.”

But the Alibaba incident is not an isolated case; it is just the tip of the iceberg above water. Before and after this incident, anonymous posts kept surfacing on social media: the female assistant asked to “liven up the atmosphere” at business dinners, the female salesperson hinted that she must “have a couple drinks with the leader” to win a project, the female PR assaulted after being coaxed drunk by a client. Such posts have persisted for years on Zhihu, Weibo, and Maimai; every few months a new case sparks brief discussion, then sinks until the next one.

The younger generation’s attitude is shifting. But the way it is shifting is not to confront the drinking culture head-on (because the power imbalance is too vast) but to vote with their feet: to avoid industries and positions that require drinking. This is the fundamental reason the demand for “jobs that do not require drinking” is so strong. It is not a light topic about drinking preferences; it is a serious proposition about personal safety and human dignity.

The Resurgence of the System Inside (2010s-2020s)

After 2015, a notable trend emerged: more and more well-educated young Chinese women were making “kaogong” (taking the civil service exam) or entering system-inside (体制内) public institutions their first career choice.

The data says it all: in 2024 the national civil service exam (国考) saw over 3.03 million applicants, an all-time high, with women consistently applying at higher rates than men. In provincial civil service exams and public institution exams, women’s participation is even higher. For some popular clerical positions, the competition ratio can reach thousands to one.

Before 2018, this trend was not obvious; back then big internet companies paid 3-5 times what the system inside offered, and young people (including young women) preferred to chase the high salaries “at the storm’s eye.” The turning point came in 2021-2023.

In 2021, the “double reduction” (双减) policy in education overnight made millions of tutoring-industry workers jobless. In 2022-2023, internet giants Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance conducted large-scale layoffs in succession, some departments were dissolved outright, and employees over 35 were hit first. In the “gold March and silver April” spring recruiting season, internet companies’ headcount (HC) shrank sharply. Meanwhile, the real estate sector’s explosions (Evergrande, Country Garden, etc.) rippled across a huge span of upstream and downstream industries from construction to finance.

In this large-scale contraction of the job market, system-inside positions became a safe harbor in the storm. Civil servants and public-institution staff will not be “optimized,” will not be fired at 35, will not lose their jobs to industry cycles. For women, the system inside has extra appeal:

• Basically no business entertaining or drinking (except a few external-reception positions)
• Promotions are slow but the rules are relatively transparent, at least there is an explicit framework
• Maternity and nursing leave is implemented properly, no being forced out in disguise for getting pregnant
• Work hours are relatively regular, rarely needing to reply to leaders at midnight
• Leaders’ power is institutionally constrained, they cannot say “don’t come in tomorrow” like a private-company boss

In one sentence: the system inside is not selling high salaries; it sells the security of “not walking on eggshells.”

Self-Media and Freelancing: A Third Path (2015-present)

But the system inside is not a panacea either. Its problems are equally obvious: slow salary growth (in many third- and fourth-tier cities a civil servant’s monthly salary is only 4,000-5,000 yuan), compressed creativity, an implicit relationship culture that still exists in some places, and fierce political maneuvering once you climb to a certain level. For women who want neither to walk on eggshells in private companies nor to burn their youth inside the system, a third path took shape around 2015.

Around that year, the WeChat official-account ecosystem matured. A group of female content creators rose, writing about emotions, parenting, careers, and lifestyle, using personal IP to gather hundreds of thousands or even millions of readers. Mimen (咪蒙) was the era’s most controversial representative: a former Southern Metropolis Daily journalist who, through extreme emotional writing, gained tens of millions of followers and huge advertising revenue within two years, later banned across platforms over content disputes. But she proved one thing: a woman can achieve economic freedom without relying on traditional employment at all, purely by producing content.

By 2018-2020, short video and livestream e-commerce exploded, widening this path tenfold. A large number of female-led content entrepreneurs emerged on Douyin, Xiaohongshu, Bilibili, and Kuaishou: beauty bloggers, lifestyle bloggers, knowledge-payment entrepreneurs, and independent brand founders of cross-border e-commerce.

2024 data: Xiaohongshu has about 300 million monthly active users, ~70 percent female. On Xiaohongshu, topics like “100 ways to not go to work” and “how much I earned in a year of freelancing” are perpetually trending. In cross-border e-commerce, women make up 70 percent of practitioners. In emerging tech roles like data analyst, requirements analyst/engineer, and speech recognition engineer, women’s share reaches 51-57 percent.

The door the digital economy opened for Chinese women echoes the US creator economy, but the soil is different. The American creator economy is more of a “lifestyle choice,” I can choose to work or choose to be a freelancer, an expression of lifestyle. China’s freelancing wave carries more of an “escape” flavor, escaping 996, escaping the dinner table, escaping the 35-year-old elimination anxiety, escaping being PUA’d by leaders.

A girl doing scrapbook tutorials on Douyin earning 20,000 yuan a month, and an American girl selling handmade jewelry on Etsy earning $3,000 a month, are doing the same thing, using their skills to connect directly to the market, bypassing all the intermediate power relationships. But the forces pushing them onto this path differ: the American girl is more being pulled, the Chinese girl more being pushed.

A Mirror: Zhilian Recruitment’s Annual Data

The “China Women’s Workplace Status Survey Report” published annually by Zhilian Recruitment (智联招聘) is an important window into the plight of Chinese working women. Several years of reports trace a clear trend.

The 2024 report showed 48.8 percent of surveyed women were asked about marriage and childbearing status during job hunting. But the 2025 data showed an unexpected rebound, this ratio spiked to 62.5 percent (while only 18.5 percent of men had this experience). The decline was not a trend, only fluctuation. Nearly two-thirds of women still face this question while job hunting, a question illegal in many countries but common in China.

Women still face a middle-management bottleneck. The report notes “structural gender differences across industries and positions still exist.” One figure is telling: at the grassroots level, male-female ratios are roughly balanced; at middle management, women’s share begins to drop noticeably; at the executive level, women account for under 20 percent. This is not because women lack ability, but because women promoted past middle management tend to be at marriage and childbearing age, and Chinese companies’ implicit bias against “women of childbearing age” is an open secret.

The 2025 report further tracked these trends. One notable signal: more and more young women rank “work atmosphere” and “whether business entertaining is required” as priorities above salary in career choice. This preference shift is directly tied to the social discussion after the 2021 Alibaba incident, which elevated “no drinking required” from a personal preference to a public issue.

There have been some responses at the national level too. The “Opinions on Implementing the Strategy of Employment First to Promote High-Quality and Full Employment” jointly issued by the CPC Central Committee and the State Council in September 2024 proposed “safeguarding women’s legitimate rights and building a childbearing-friendly employment environment.” In early 2025, the concept of “fertility-friendly positions” (生育友好岗) was proposed, attempting to create a more female-friendly work environment at the institutional design level.

But between a policy’s issuance and its implementation lies an entire China, especially when the same country is both pushing a “three-child policy” and calling for a “fertility-friendly employment environment”; the tension is obvious.

III. Cross-Sectional Analysis: One Question, Two Parallel Universes

What Does “Not Walking on Eggshells” Mean? Aligning the Semantics First

Before comparing specific jobs, a fundamental divergence needs clarification: when Chinese and American women say “not walking on eggshells,” they are actually talking about different things.

When Chinese women say it, the core meaning is, not having to perform acts of submissiveness in power relations that surrender personal dignity. Concrete manifestations include: not drinking at business dinners, not being PUA’d, not being used as a “vase” by clients or leaders at banquets, not being marginalized or pushed out for getting pregnant, not having to instantly reply to leaders’ messages in WeChat groups until midnight, not having to join 996 without being branded “not wolf enough,” not having to carefully guess the leader’s mind in the office. This is a need for safety and dignity.

When American women say “no office politics” or “work-life balance”, the core meaning is, not exhausting oneself in zero-sum promotion competition, while finding a sustainable balance between family responsibilities and career development. Concrete manifestations include: flexible working hours, remote work options, not being excluded from the boys’ club informal decision circle, not being passed over for promotion for getting pregnant, transparent pay with equal pay for equal work, not being mansplained by male colleagues, not being treated as “somebody’s wife” at networking events. This is a need for fairness and balance.

See the difference? Understood through Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: Chinese women are first solving the “safety level” problem; American women are already working at the “esteem” and “self-actualization” levels.

This difference determines that the two countries’ women have completely different standards for evaluating “a good job.” The same clerical job inside the system, a Chinese woman might rate as “wonderful, no entertaining, no overtime,” while an American woman might rate it “so boring, zero growth space.”

China: A Map of Jobs Without Drinking

First Tier: The System Inside (civil servants, public institutions, teachers)

Why ranked first: not because the pay is highest or most interesting, but because its score is highest on the core dimension of “not walking on eggshells.”

Civil servants

Salaries vary enormously by region, Beijing and Shanghai civil servants earn about 150,000-250,000 yuan a year (including five social insurances plus housing fund and various subsidies), third- and fourth-tier cities about 80,000-150,000. The core advantage is not money but clear job boundaries. The vast majority of positions (especially office clerical, archives management, auditing, statistics) require no business entertaining at all. Leadership power is institutionally constrained; they cannot fire you with one sentence like a private-company boss. Maternity, nursing leave, and other policies are implemented at far higher rates than in private companies.

Entry barrier: the national exam is fiercely competitive. In 2024 the average competition ratio was about 77:1, and popular positions (like tax bureaus, customs, statistics bureau posts in first-tier cities) can reach thousands to one. But once you get in, the turnover rate is extremely low, which itself shows how satisfied incumbents are with the job.

To be honest: not every system-inside position is a paradise. Township civil servants’ workload can exceed that of urban white-collar workers, some reception departments and investment-attraction positions still require entertaining, and grassroots formalism and layer-upon-layer reporting are also a form of “walking on eggshells,” just gentler in form than the dinner table.

Teachers (public schools)

Public school teachers are effectively public-institution positions. Primary school teachers earn about 80,000-150,000 a year (depending on region), secondary school about 100,000-200,000. The winter and summer breaks are the biggest hidden benefit, not just “time to rest” but “time to do your own things,” which is extremely important to many women.

Teacher positions skew heavily female, over 70 percent of primary school teachers are women, over 60 percent in middle schools. This means gender power relations in the work environment are naturally weaker. Most of your colleagues are women, your leader is likely a woman too, and the dinner table culture basically does not exist in this professional ecosystem.

The cost? The income ceiling is low, title evaluation is a long drawn-out process that sometimes involves personal favors, parent relationships can be exhausting (in some urban schools, the pressure in parent groups rivals the workplace), and, increasingly, non-teaching administrative tasks are squeezing teachers’ personal time.

Librarians/Museum/Archives

These are the “treasure positions” inside the system, leisurely to the point of luxury. Annual income about 60,000-120,000, clear and repetitive work content, very low social pressure. For introvert women this might be the ideal state. The downsides are obvious too: low pay, limited growth space, and in some cities a feeling of insufficient social value.

What Zhihu says: discussions about “women kaogong/kaobian” (taking civil service/institutional exams) are perpetually hot. The core points of top-voted answers are strikingly consistent: “It’s not that the system inside is so good, it’s that outside the system gives people no sense of security.” “My classmate went to a big company earning 500k a year but works overtime till 11 every day and has to drink with leaders. I’m at the district government earning 120k, off promptly at 5:30, never work weekends. Three years later she got laid off and I’m still here.”

Second Tier: Technical Remote Positions

Programmer/Software Engineer (remote)

Remote work adoption in China’s internet industry is far lower than in the US, but it accelerated noticeably after the 2022 layoff wave, both because some companies cut office space and because more and more programmers voluntarily choose remote or outsourced models. Female programmers in first-tier cities earn about 200,000-500,000 a year; remote freelance or outsourced about 150,000-350,000.

The core advantage of tech roles is “code speaks.” Your output is quantifiable, how many features you built, how many bugs you fixed, what your code quality is like, all have objective measures. For a leader to PUA you, they must first be able to read your pull requests. 996 is a widespread problem at big companies, but small and mid-sized companies and remote positions are much better.

A growing model: Chinese female programmers take overseas projects through global platforms like Upwork and Toptal, earning near-USD wages while enjoying Chinese living costs. This “geographic arbitrage” is creating a brand-new way of working for some technically strong women.

UI/UX Designer

Annual income about 120,000-300,000. Women already make up a relatively high share (about 40-50 percent) of design positions in Chinese internet companies. Remote feasibility is better than development because lots of outsourcing and project-based demand lets designers work as freelancers. You need to communicate with product managers and clients, but this basically does not involve dinner entertaining, communication is to advance the project, not to maintain “relationships.”

Data Analyst

Annual income about 150,000-350,000. Zhilian’s data shows women already exceed 51 percent of data analyst positions. The work is dealing with data, a typical position that “does not require walking on eggshells around anyone,” except the data’s “mood.” The only problem: in some traditional companies, data analysts may be asked to “beautify the data” to fit the leader’s decisions, which is another form of “walking on eggshells.”

Third Tier: Creative Freelance Work

Self-media/Content Creator

This is a high-risk, high-reward path. Take Xiaohongshu: top bloggers (1 million+ followers) can earn millions or more a year; mid-tier bloggers (10k-100k followers) earn about 5,000-30,000 yuan a month; the tail (under 10k followers) mostly cannot sustain full-time income from it.

Core advantage: fully autonomous, no superior-subordinate relationships, no entertaining (unless you do business-facing content that needs to host brand partners). You decide when to work, how long, what content. For many women who have experienced workplace PUA, this sense of autonomy is itself worth a fortune.

Core risk: income is highly unstable, platform algorithm changes can slash your exposure overnight, the pressure of sustained creation can morph into a new “self-PUA,” and once your income reaches a certain scale and you start taking commercial collaborations, you inevitably deal with brand parties and MCNs, in a sense returning to the “walking on eggshells” loop.

Translation (high-end direction)

With the rapid progress of AI translation, the market for plain-text translation (especially general text) is visibly shrinking. But high-end translation, simultaneous interpreting (5,000-15,000 yuan a day), legal translation, medical translation, technical documentation localization, still has a decent market. Freelance translators earn about 8,000-30,000 yuan a month (huge variance).

This is a career very suited to introvert women: you deal far more with text than with people. But it demands high skills, and the AI threat is real, not that it will fully replace translators, but that it will drive low-end translation prices to near zero, forcing you to move upmarket.

Illustrator/Independent Designer

Freelance illustrators earn about 5,000-30,000 yuan a month (depending on reputation and client quality). Content like “a day in the life of a freelance illustrator” is popular on Bilibili and Xiaohongshu, but survivorship bias is severe: you see the success stories, not the far more numerous ones earning under 3,000 a month.

Fourth Tier: Emerging Professions

AI Prompt Engineer/AI Trainer

New roles from 2023-2025, monthly salary about 10,000-30,000 yuan. Women account for a relatively high share in language-type AI training tasks (because many training tasks involve text comprehension and dialogue quality evaluation, where women’s group advantage in language ability shows up). This kind of work can usually be done remotely and is in the industry’s early stage, so the entrenched patterns of gender discrimination have not yet formed.

The risk: this is a fast-iterating technical field. Today’s “prompt engineer” may no longer be needed in two years as AI capabilities improve, just as the “web designer” of the early 2000s was eventually dissolved by Squarespace and Wix.

Cross-border E-commerce Operations

Women make up as much as 70 percent, and annual income varies enormously (small sellers profit tens of thousands, top sellers millions). Core advantage: can be done at home, you face overseas consumers rather than Chinese-style entertaining relationships, and China’s supply-chain advantage keeps product costs extremely low. Core risks: platform policy changes (the Amazon account-banning incidents), logistics cost fluctuations, currency risk.

Psychological Counselor

Annual income varies enormously, part-time about 50,000-100,000, a mature independent practitioner about 150,000-500,000. China’s psychological counseling market grew rapidly after 2020 (driven by both the pandemic and social anxiety), but the entry barrier is not low (you need training, supervision, internships; the time and money costs are high). It is almost one of the most “egghell-free” professions, because in the counseling relationship, the client needs you, not you needing to please anyone.

“Minefield Industries” to Avoid

For completeness, here are the industries scoring lowest on the “drinking” and “walking on eggshells” dimensions:

America: A Map of Jobs Without Walking on Eggshells

First Tier: Healthcare

The appeal of the healthcare industry to American women, and the appeal of the system inside to Chinese women, share a similar underlying logic: a high professional-skill barrier (hard to replace once you enter), objective work evaluation (whether the patient got better is visible), and rigid-industry demand (not much affected by economic cycles).

Nurse Practitioner

Median salary about $126,000 (2025 BLS data). This income level lets you live very comfortably in America. NPs can independently prescribe and diagnose (in some states), the work is skill-oriented, and there is basically no “office politics,” you face patients and medical records, not a boss and KPIs. About 89 percent are women, meaning the work environment itself is female-dominated. Shift scheduling gives some time flexibility (though night shifts are a pain point).

Moreover, NP market demand keeps growing, America faces a serious shortage of primary care physicians, and NPs are filling that gap. This means extremely high job security: you do not worry about being laid off; rather, it is employers who worry about keeping you.

Occupational Therapist

Median salary about $93,000. Requires a master’s degree (OTD, Doctor of Occupational Therapy programs are also increasing). About 83 percent are women. Helps people recovering from injury, disability, or developmental disorders regain daily function. The work gives enormous gratification, you can see with your own eyes a stroke patient who could not dress alone regain independence with your help. Work settings are mostly clinics, hospitals, or schools, with simple interpersonal relations.

Dental Hygienist

Median salary about $87,000. Requires only an associate’s degree (two-year community college). More than 95 percent are women, possibly one of the highest female proportions of any occupation in the US. Work hours are extremely fixed (dental clinics generally do not do overtime or night shifts), almost no entertaining needs, and income is above the middle-class level. The input-output ratio may be the best on this list, a two-year degree for nearly $90,000 a year in income, extremely cost-effective.

It is repeatedly named one of “America’s best jobs for women” (permanently on the U.S. News & World Report annual lists), for a simple reason: high pay, low stress, flexible, stable.

Psychotherapist/Clinical Social Worker (LCSW)

Median salary about $60,000-$90,000, depending on credentials, region, and practice format. Having your own private practice means complete time autonomy, you decide how many clients per week, when, and what to charge. After the pandemic, the spread of telehealth made remote counseling from a “special arrangement” into a routine operation, further increasing flexibility.

Second Tier: Technology

Software Engineer (remote)

Median salary about $130,000, FAANG-level can reach $200,000-$400,000 (including RSUs). Remote work is already highly common in the US tech industry. Meta, Shopify, GitLab and others have adopted fully remote models; Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are hybrid. The core advantage for women is similar to China: code is the most objective evaluation standard, and remote work eliminates most of the physical scenarios of office politics.

Core challenge: women make up only about 25-28 percent of software engineering. “Bro culture” still exists at some companies (especially startups). But the good news is that remote-first work culture is weakening this culture, when everyone is an avatar on Slack, gender bias is somewhat weaker than in face-to-face interaction.

UX Designer/UX Researcher

Median salary about $110,000-$130,000. Women make up close to 45 percent of design and user research, far higher than engineering, and remote feasibility is strong. The work centers on user research, prototyping, and design systems, requiring team collaboration but not business entertaining.

Data Scientist

Median salary about $120,000-$150,000. Still among the fastest-growing professions. About 35 percent are women. The work is highly technical, running models, writing SQL, doing A/B tests, leaving little room for “walking on eggshells.” Many DS roles support remote or hybrid work.

Third Tier: Creative/Freelance

Freelance Content Creator

Income range is extremely wide, from part-time $2,000 a month to full-time well-known creators earning $500,000+ a year. Top writers on Substack can reach six-figure annual subscription income; YouTube creators earn from a combination of ad share, sponsorships, and merchandise.

A distinctive feature of the American creator economy is a more mature ecosystem: dedicated creator management companies (like Spotter, Jellysmack), standardized brand-deal pricing models, and creator insurance and retirement plans (some platforms are starting to offer these). This makes “being a creator” not just “a gamble” but a career path with infrastructure support.

Women hold an absolute advantage in vertical content like lifestyle, parenting, wellness, and education. An interesting data point: 87 percent of Etsy sellers are women, and Etsy’s 2024 GMV was about $13 billion, meaning on Etsy alone, millions of women earn income through their creativity and handicrafts, without needing to walk on eggshells around anyone.

Graphic Designer/Web Designer (freelance)

Annual income about $50,000-$100,000. Takes global clients through platforms like Fiverr, Upwork, and 99designs. Work time and location are fully autonomous. The advantage of American freelance designers: English is the global language of business, so your client pool is the world.

Fourth Tier: Education/Consulting

Instructional Designer

Median salary about $75,000-$85,000. Designs training courses and learning experiences for companies and educational institutions. Very high remote-work rate (after the pandemic, this role’s remote degree approaches that of software engineers). High female share. A relatively niche but stable and growing role, as companies increase employee training investment, demand for IDs keeps rising.

Financial Planner (independent practice)

Median salary about $95,000, top-tier can reach $200,000+. The share of women with the CFP (Certified Financial Planner) credential keeps rising, from about 23 percent in 2010 to about 30 percent in 2024. Independent practice means choosing your own clients, scheduling your own time, and pricing yourself. For women good at building trust-based relationships and with financial knowledge, this is a career path with a high income ceiling and full autonomy.

Core Dimension Comparison Summary Table

An Interesting Symmetry

The “egghell-free” jobs that Chinese women crave are often the jobs American women find “so boring,” civil servants inside the system, stable teaching posts. Meanwhile, the creator economy, freelancing, and portfolio careers that American women pursue are seen by many Chinese parents as “unstable” and “not respectable” choices.

This is not about who is right and who is wrong. It is about two different risk preferences, and behind risk preferences lies the difference in safety nets.

America has a relatively complete legal protection system (the EEOC can accept complaints and launch investigations), anti-discrimination litigation mechanisms (class actions can force companies to pay astronomical damages), and unemployment insurance (covered by most states for 26 weeks). Although the lack of universal healthcare is a huge pain point (one of the main reasons many American women dare not leave jobs easily, losing employer-sponsored health insurance means buying individual insurance on the open market for $500-$1,500 a month), the overall institutionalized protections keep the cost of “risk-taking” manageable.

China’s safety net is “relationships” and “official status.” People without official status are fragile in the labor market, legal protections theoretically exist, but the cost of asserting rights is high, evidence collection is difficult, and after labor arbitration one may be “blacklisted” by the industry. In this environment, a woman’s rational choice is either to enter an institutionalized “safe zone” (the system inside), or to not rely on any organization at all (freelancing, being your own safety net). The middle ground, long-term development in a private company, is actually the highest-risk option, because you have neither official-status protection nor freelancer flexibility.

IV. Insights from the Intersection of the Two Axes

How History Shaped Today’s Divergence

Laying the two timelines on top of each other, a deep pattern emerges.

American women’s path of professional liberation is bottom-up: from the 1960s street struggles, to the 1970s legal rights establishment, to the 1980s workplace penetration, to the 2010s #MeToo cultural reckoning, to the 2020s remote work structural liberation. Every step was fought for by women themselves, and every step was accompanied by fierce public debate and social tearing. This path has taken 60 years and is far from finished, but the direction is clear, from fighting for the “right of access” to fighting for a “fair environment” to fighting for “autonomous choice.”

Chinese women’s path is entirely different. The first stage of “liberation” was granted from the top down (1949-1978: the state needed labor, so it made women work), then partially withdrawn during market reform (1980s-2000s: the market did not want to bear women’s childbearing costs, so discrimination returned), and then in the internet and digital economy era achieved a new round of spontaneous liberation through technical means (2015-present: the platform economy let women monetize skills by bypassing traditional power structures).

What is missing in the middle? A bottom-up, independent feminist movement stage.

This is not a small omission. It means Chinese women’s rights protection in the workplace relies more on the direction of state policy than on an institutional safety net supported by civil society. When state policy leans toward protecting women (like launching fertility-friendly positions), women’s situation improves; when the policy wind shifts (like the implicit signal of the three-child policy, we need you to have more children), the discrimination women face in the job market may even intensify.

This directly explains why Chinese women must first solve “safety” and “dignity” problems, while American women further pursue “fairness” and “balance.” Not because Chinese women have a lower level of aspiration, but because their institutional environment has not yet turned safety and dignity into a “default” baseline. In an environment where you must worry about what might happen after being coaxed to drink, discussing the “glass ceiling” and “pay gap” is a luxury.

The Competitor’s Competitor: Why the System Inside and Healthcare Took Two Paths

If China’s “system inside” and America’s “healthcare” are seen as the “first-choice safe harbor” of the two countries’ women, an interesting question arises: why these two directions?

China’s system inside provides institutional protection, state-endorsed job stability, a standardized benefits system, and rule-based power operations. Its core value is “protecting you from being harmed.”

America’s healthcare provides skill-based protection, you master a professional skill that is highly scarce in the market and cannot be easily replaced by AI, and employers need you more than you need them. Its core value is “giving you the capital to leave anytime.”

These two protection strategies map to two completely different “power logics.” In China, the most effective protection comes from “being absorbed by a powerful system,” your sense of security comes from belonging. In America, the most effective protection comes from “making the market fight over you,” your sense of security comes from scarcity.

This difference has deep cultural and institutional roots. China’s social contract is traditionally collectivist, an individual’s safety depends on the collective (family, work unit, state). America’s social contract is traditionally individualistic, an individual’s safety depends on one’s own abilities and legal protections. Each path has its own fragility: China’s path collapses when the collective stops protecting you (like the SOE layoff tide); America’s path collapses when your personal skill is no longer needed (like AI replacing certain occupations).

Technology Is Narrowing the Gap, But Not in the Way You Think

There is one force changing both countries’ situations at once: digital technology. But its role is not simply “letting everyone work remotely”; it reconstructs the underlying logic of “walking on eggshells” at a deeper level.

The “walking on eggshells” in the traditional workplace essentially comes from information asymmetry and high exit costs. You do not know what the leader really thinks, so you must read their face; the cost of switching jobs is high, so you tolerate unreasonable treatment.

Digital technology attacks both conditions at once.

Information transparency: Glassdoor, Maimai, and Blind make company culture and salary levels no longer secrets. How heavy a company’s dinner culture is, how frequent the overtime, a search on these platforms tells you. This lowers information asymmetry.

Declining exit costs: when your skills can be monetized on the global market (through remote work platforms), when you have multiple income streams (self-media + contracting + investing), when you do not depend on a single employer’s insurance and benefits, the cost of leaving an uncomfortable environment drops dramatically.

My judgment: by around 2030, Chinese and American women’s choices will converge increasingly on the “jobs without walking on eggshells” dimension. Both countries will see large numbers of “solo professionals,” independent, skill-driven, remote, not attached to any single organization. They may be doing UX design for a New York company from a cafe in Beijing, or using AI tools at home in Portland to make product images for a Shenzhen seller.

But this convergence has one key prerequisite: you must have portable skills.

Programming ability, design ability, writing ability, data analysis ability, digital marketing ability, these are the “hard currencies” that work universally in the global market. Women with these skills, whether in Beijing or San Francisco, can build an “egghell-free” career.

And those women whose skills are not portable and can only be monetized within a specific organization, secretaries dependent on a particular leader’s trust, administrative staff who know only one company’s ERP system, middlemen who survive on connections rather than professional ability, will remain trapped in the traditional power structure.

In other words: the freedom to “not walk on eggshells” is shifting from an institutional identity (having official status vs not) to a capability state (having portable skills vs not).

Three Scenarios

The most likely scenario: layering and solidification

The group of women with digital skills (about 20-30 percent of the female labor force in both countries) will be the first to achieve the “no eggshells” freedom, through remote work, freelancing, and the creator economy building independent career paths. But a larger share of women, especially those outside first-tier cities, without higher education, or in services/manufacturing, will remain trapped in the traditional workplace structure. The differences between China and the US will not disappear, but the class stratification within each country will intensify. “Not walking on eggshells” will increasingly become a class privilege rather than a universal right.

This scenario has the highest probability, because acquiring and accumulating skills takes time and resources; a girl from a rural family and a girl from an urban middle-class family start from completely different positions in obtaining “portable skills.” And the existing education systems in both countries have not adequately adjusted to this change.

The most optimistic scenario: AI-driven skill democratization

If AI tools evolve fast enough (which is possible based on the current trajectory), the barriers to acquiring “hard skills” like programming, design, and data analysis will drop dramatically. A woman without a CS degree can complete professional-level development work with AI assistance; a founder with no design background can use AI to generate commercial-grade visuals; a Chinese woman with poor English can use AI translation tools to serve global clients.

This means the acquisition cost of “portable skills” plummets, and more women get the opportunity to enter the “no eggshells” career track. Chinese women may benefit even more, because the “eggshells” they must escape are heavier (dinner table culture + marriage/childbearing discrimination + 35-year-old anxiety) and their motivation is stronger. In this scenario, “not walking on eggshells” could descend from a class privilege to a fairly common career choice within a decade.

But this scenario’s premise is that AI tools remain accessible and cheap. If AI service pricing ultimately becomes affordable only to the high-income group, it would instead intensify stratification.

The most dangerous scenario: new forms of digital control

Remote work does not equal freedom.

Some companies already use monitoring software like Hubstaff and Time Doctor to track remote workers’ screen activity, keyboard input frequency, and even camera status. Algorithm-driven performance evaluation may be crueler than a human boss, at least with a human boss you can read their face, communicate, explain; when an algorithm gives you a low score, you do not even know why, and there is no place to appeal.

In the creator economy, the platform algorithm is the new “boss.” It decides how many people see your content, what kind of audience it is recommended to, and thus your income. A slight tuning of a Douyin or TikTok algorithm can halve the income of a blogger earning 100,000 a month, and she does not even know what happened.

From “reading the leader’s face” to “reading the algorithm’s face.”

From “being PUA’d by the boss” to “being PUA’d by the platform mechanism,” every piece of your content must pander to the algorithm’s preferences, your creative freedom is firmly gripped by an invisible hand, you think you are free, but actually you have just traded one cage for another.

And in this new cage, you cannot even find a target to protest against. Who do you protest to? A deep learning model?

Back to the Beginning

This report started from a seemingly simple question: “jobs suitable for women that are easy and pleasant, requiring neither drinking nor walking on eggshells.”

Having written almost 20,000 characters, I want to say a truth that may be unpopular.

Real “not walking on eggshells” is not finding a perfect occupation category.

Because no such category exists. The system inside has its own eggshells to walk on (formalism, seniority, political correctness), freelancing has its own eggshells (algorithms, clients, market volatility), remote work has its own eggshells (invisible assessments, the anxiety of being always online, the risk of marginalization).

Real “not walking on eggshells” is building the ability to say “no.”

You possess a skill that is scarce in the market, so you can say no to companies that disrespect you. You have enough savings (an emergency fund of at least six months of living expenses), so you can say no to unreasonable overtime. You have income streams across multiple platforms, so you do not depend on any single employer, client, or algorithm. You understand your legal rights, so you can choose to fight rather than endure when violated. You have a supportive social network (friends, family, community), so you are not left isolated after saying “no.”

This “ability to say no” is the real female professional freedom.

It has nothing to do with nationality, women in Beijing and San Francisco are pursuing the same thing, just by different paths.

It has nothing to do with industry, the civil servant inside the system and the remote programmer walk different roads to the same destination.

It has to do with the era, we happen to live in an era where technology is making this freedom unprecedentedly accessible.

Rosie the Riveter, mentioned at the start of this article, when she walked into the factory in 1943, was pursuing nothing more than the same thing. Eighty years later, the factory has become a laptop, the assembly line has become code and content, but that most simple demand has never changed:

I want to earn my living by my own ability, without walking on eggshells around anyone.

Seize the opportunity this era gives you.

V. Sources

1. Zhilian Recruitment, “2024 China Women’s Workplace Status Survey Report,” March 2024 - https://www.fxbaogao.com/detail/4521569
2. Zhilian Research Institute, “2025 China Women’s Workplace Status Survey Report,” 2025 - https://blog.csdn.net/kymdidicom/article/details/146465904
3. McKinsey, “Half the Sky in the New Era: Gender Equality in the Chinese Workplace” - https://www.mckinsey.com.cn/
4. Tencent News, “2024 White Paper on Chinese Women’s Career Development,” April 2025 - https://news.qq.com/rain/a/20250417A023LJ00
5. The Paper, “Away from the ‘dinner table culture’, what young people ‘avoid’ is not alcohol,” 2021 - https://www.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_13993384
6. China News Service, “Firmly Say No to the Ugly ‘drinking culture’!”, August 2021 - https://www.chinanews.com/cj/2021/08-09/9539684.shtml
7. The Paper, “Dinner table culture, why it became a shield for bullying and crime?”, 2021 - https://www.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_13977802
8. Sina News, “The unexamined acceptance of dinner-table governance culture: soil for power discipline and the objectification of women,” August 2021 - https://news.sina.cn/gn/2021-08-12/detail-ikqcfncc2409307.d.html
9. Wikipedia, “Alibaba employee molestation case” - https://zh.wikipedia.org/
10. Beijing News, “Nearly half of working women asked about marriage/childbearing in job hunts, down over a tenth from last year,” March 2024 - https://news.bjd.com.cn/2024/03/08/10715936.shtml
11. People’s Political Consultative News, “To promote women’s high-quality full employment, learn about ‘fertility-friendly positions’!”, January 2025 - https://www.rmzxw.com.cn/c/2025-01-16/3666072.shtml
12. Shanghai Development and Reform Commission, “Implement the basic national policy of gender equality in high-quality economic development,” March 2025 - https://fegw.sh.gov.cn/
13. McKinsey & LeanIn.org, “Women in the Workplace 2024” Report - https://www.mckinsey.com/
14. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Occupational Employment and Wages” 2024-2025 - https://www.bls.gov/
15. World Economic Forum, “Global Gender Gap Report 2025” - https://www.weforum.org/
16. Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, Nicholas Bloom, “Working from Home Research” - https://wfhresearch.com/
17. Pew Research Center, “The State of Gig Work in 2025” - https://www.pewresearch.org/
18. National Women’s Law Center, “The She-Cession: COVID-19’s Impact on Women” - https://nwlc.org/
19. U.S. News & World Report, “Best Jobs for Women 2025” - https://money.usnews.com/
20. Susan Fowler, “Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber”, February 2017 - https://www.susanfowler.com/
21. Jiemian News, “The alienated dinner table culture, the ‘fig leaf’ of power rules,” 2021 - https://www.jiemian.com/article/6459026.html
22. Huxiu, “The toast culture, far more than workplace bullying,” 2021 - https://www.huxiu.com/article/379180.html
23. Goldman Sachs, “Creator Economy Report 2024” - https://www.goldmansachs.com/

Methodology note: this report uses the Horizontal-Vertical Analysis method, proposed by KKKKhazix. The vertical axis tracks the complete developmental history of the research object along the time dimension; the horizontal axis conducts a systematic comparative analysis at the current time slice; the two axes are finally crossed to produce integrated insights.