Employment quality and mental health in China under the policy of expanding jobs and benefiting people's livelihood: gender differences between low-quality employment and work-family values

WenQi Zhao^*

• Guangxi Normal University, Guilin, China

With the rapid development of China's social economy, the state has introduced multiple social security and employment policies, which integrate the core principles of stabilizing employment, ensuring people's livelihoods, and supporting key groups.Empirical studies often employ cross-sectional data to examine the impact of low-quality employment on workers' mental health, yet evidence regarding the association between employment quality and mental health remains insufficient. This study aims to analyze the potential long-term effects of low-quality employment on mental health. Utilizing the typology of employment arrangements, we employed the 2016–2018 survey waves of the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS)and investigated the link between employment quality and mental health, further exploring whether the strength of work-family values (i.e., the importance placed on career success versus having children) and gender differences contribute to varying patterns in this association. Through latent class cluster analysis of representative panel data from China, we identified six types of employment quality: standard employment, precarious and unsustainable employment, full-time but unstable employment, mildly standard employment, mixed-type employment, and protected part-time employment. After controlling for sociodemographic characteristics, the results revealed that, compared to standard employment, men engaged in precarious and unsustainable employment and women in full-time unstable employment exhibited significantly lower mental health levels two years later. Although protected part-time employment had a more negative mental health impact on individuals with moderate-to-high work-family values, interaction analyses indicated that the moderating role of values in the relationship between employment quality and mental health did not demonstrate clear patterns across gender groups. Future research is recommended to replicate these findings in different countries to confirm these associations.