ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Personality and Social Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1628896
This article is part of the Research TopicSocial Psychological Perspectives on Threat: Understanding Climate, Economic, and Health ThreatsView all 9 articles
Examining the Effects of Upward Social Mobility on Women's Workplace Experiences in China
Provisionally accepted
Wei Ding1
Wen-Cheng Wang1,2*- 1The College of Metaverse and New Media, Fuzhou, China
- 2Yango University, Fuzhou, China
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This study examines how upward social mobility shapes Chinese women's workplace experiences by applying social comparison theory and asking which structural -related factors most strongly influence women ' s perceptions ofand strategies foroccupational advancement in contemporary China. Employing Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling on 4,043 Zhihu comments under the "involution" discussion, we identify five operational dimensions-economic reward-value alignment, work burden, institutional environment, resource distribution, and individual agency-that collectively explain variation in perceived mobility opportunities. Our results show that misalignment between compensation and perceived professional worth, coupled with excessive instructional and emotional labor, constitutes a primary barrier, whereas supportive institutional policies and strong professional identity mitigate constraints. These findings offer actionable insights for policymakers and educational leaders to reform compensation structures and workload management, thereby fostering more equitable career advancement for women in China.
Keywords: Social comparison theory, Upward mobility, Chinese women in the workplace, thematic analysis model, Latent Dirichlet Allocation
Received: 15 May 2025; Accepted: 22 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Ding and Wang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Wen-Cheng Wang, Yango University, Fuzhou, China
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