The way they are : the lives of Hong Kong office ladies in the 1990s

Abstract

This dissertation examines the rise and fall of Hong Kong's Office Ladies (abbreviated as OLs, i.e. the white-collar working daughters) in the 1990s. After deindustrialization in the late 1980s, trading, finance and business services became the major contributing sector of Hong Kong’s GDP. A lot of white-collar positions were created targeting the female labor force (nearly 70% of clerks were women). Compared to the tragic relegation of female factory workers from independent wage earners to stay-home dependents, the OLs are regarded as the lucky educated girls with better skillsets and stabler job. However, in the face of the economic restructuring and downward trend, the glamourous OLs in the 1990 were as powerless as the less stylish female factory workers in the 1970s. The main focus of existing historical and sociological studies are the changing lives, roles and powers of female factory workers but seldom further examine the lives of “working daughters’ daughters”, i.e. the OLs in the 1990s. To echo Janet W. Salaff’s study on Hong Kong working daughters in the 1970s, this dissertation is primarily based on the oral histories of three OLs in the 1990s, to present the first-hand and original life experiences and unveil the paths that they had gone through in the heyday and in the financial crisis, as well as the lives they are living nowadays. It argues that the expansion of education in the 1980s and the economic prosperity in the 1990s empowered the OLs to gain financial independence eventually. But still, this temporary triumph neither lasted long nor helped them to resist the power of the modified centripetal family or the economic downturn.