To impose an economic cage on mothers; Mama’s post (妈妈岗) : issues and implications
If you were a mother with a newborn baby in China, the chances of you being able to secure a job or maintain a stable career would be devastatingly low. Having this matter established within the workforce, many women in China trade off not having children for job stability and receiving a normal wage in fear of being fired, being less productive, or being looked down upon in the industry. However, alongside these facts, China’s birth rate has been actively declining, having reached a record low in 2025: 5.63 births per 1000 people. Incentivised to raise the birth rate and expand female employment, the Chinese government implemented the Mama-gang (妈妈岗), along with mainstream narratives framing these initiatives as helping mothers re-enter the labour market with more flexible working hours.
The mechanisms under this government initiative are simple: local governments offer tax incentives and cash subsidies to businesses that create flexible, part-time, or remote roles that would suit maternal schedules. This means that mothers possess the ability to clock out for school pick-ups, and avoid the overtime culture of modern China, efficiently helping them balance between work (main source of income) and family.
But this world of the Mama-gang (妈妈岗) is inherently a corporate illusion. The picture state propaganda tries to create is one of corporate equity, where professional women would be able to efficiently balance between the office and their child. However, this picture might never come to reality when looking at the types of jobs currently being offered. Instead of transforming existing professional, technical, or management positions into flexible roles, companies have used the policy to create a secondary and highly exploitative tier of labour. Notice how the vast majority of Mama-gangs are concentrated entirely into low-skill, dead end sectors; these look like: piece rate assembly lines in factories, school cafeteria staffing, and e-commerce customer livestream services. Thus, when offered flexibility, women are forced into a downgrade: insofar as they want to maintain a stable income for their family, they have to give up their hard-earned career ambitions.
The initiative creates an institutional degradation loop
The key nature of Mama-gang is not simply giving low wages or monotonous tasks; it is the fact that it traps women in a self-reinforcing, systemic downward loop. This means that when a woman has a child, they instantly belong into an underpaid, marginalized underclass that filters talented and qualified women out of the circle.
This loop is very predictable; when a qualified professional woman attempts to reenter the workforce after child-birth, she is forced by sheer necessity and childcare demands to accept a Mama-gang position, confronted by a primary labour market that is very hostile towards women.
Once inside this secondary tier, the trap snaps shut through the process of structural stagnation. Because Mama-gang roles are segregated from a company's main operations, these workers are entirely excluded from standard corporate promotion tracks and professional skill-building networks. This is shown in the 2026 workplace mother status report: while over half of working mothers utilize and work in these flexible roles for daily survival, fewer than six percent believe they have any realistic path to career advancement.
When the child grows older and the mother attempts to re-enter the standard competitive workforce, she finds out that her time spent in a Mama-gang has actively degraded her resume. Especially in the eyes of traditional HR departments, years of flexible, part-time labor are viewed not as a sign of resilience or hard work, but as evidence of professional regression and a loss of competitiveness and productivity. This harms a woman and contradicts the state’s goal, because by institutionalizing a separate, lesser tier of work, the policy ensures that once a woman enters the maternal loop, she is structurally degraded and less meaningful to the workforce industry.
This initiative imposes a glass ceiling onto women
Because it is creating an officially sanctioned, state-sponsored tier of secondary labor, the policy gives corporations a legitimate, legally compliant mechanism to stop women’s career progression, turning a women’s career into a structural dead end.
This operates on a false premise of accommodation and job stability. When a company calls a role as a "Mother’s Position," it implicitly means that this role exists outside the competitive jobs within the company. Because these positions are built around hyper-flexibility and pro-rated hours, management automatically detaches them from the company’s strategic growth, important projects, and the process of decision-making itself..
The mother is placed on a parallel track, one that runs adjacent to the career ladder, but gives no opportunity for the mother to climb it.
Mama-gang allows corporations to check a box for social responsibility and diversity, all while making sure that their executive and high-paying management positions remain entirely unburdened by the tiring realities of maternal care. It imposes a glass ceiling on women by redefining what "success" looks like for a working mother. The goal is not on professional achievement and economic autonomy, but simply workplace survival.
What should a policy supporting mothers actually look like?
What current initiatives fail to do is that they treat childcare as a private, uniquely female obligation that corporations must simply accommodate. A policy that genuinely supports mothers must desexualise caregiving as a role of women only, socialize the financial burden of child-rearing, and enforce workplace equality.
First, a progressive framework must replace the gender-segregated Mama-gang with mandatory, gender-neutral "Parenting Positions" (生育友好岗). True workplace equity cannot exist as long as flexibility is marketed exclusively to women. Policies must legally mandate that any flexible, remote, or part-time structures offered to mothers must be equally available—and actively incentivized—for fathers.
Furthermore, China’s statutory paternity leave must be aggressively extended to match the 158-day maternal baseline, transforming it into a non-transferable "use-it-or-lose-it" block of time. By forcing men to step out of the workplace and into the domestic sphere on equal terms, the state can finally break the corporate bias that views women alone as "high-risk, high-cost" employees.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, the Mama-gang initiative creates a superficial solution to a deeply cultural problem. Insofar as it prioritizes 'flexibility' over equity, the policy effectively incentivizes companies to relegate mothers to a secondary labor tier, codifying their professional stagnation under the guise of support. The economic cage of the Mama-gang persists because it doesn’t challenge the underlying system of traditional enterprises. Until China moves toward a gender-neutral framework, which supports shared parenting responsibilities and de-sexualizes the burden of care, these initiatives will continue to offer mothers a path to short-term survival, trading off their long-term economic autonomy.
Written by: Suri Hu
