Digital Transformation, Information Search, and Women’s High-Quality Employment

Abstract The promotion of fuller and higher-quality employment is a prime task for China’s high-quality development. Both employment security (ES) and employment quality (EQ) need to be improved for women who, as an essential part of labor force, have long been faced with high stress and employment threshold. The role of digital transformation in promoting women’s employment through reducing the cost of job information search is analyzed with the Job Search Theory in this paper. By using China Household Finance Survey (CHFS) data, this research found that digital transformation of households in China contributes to women’s employment significantly, raises the number and proportion of female family members in employment, and enhances women’ access to medical care insurance, endowment insurance, unemployment insurance, housing fund and overtime pay. Digital transformation can improve the information accessibility of households, and the reduction in information asymmetries benefits women’s employment, as indicated by the mechanism analysis. The positive impact of digital transformation is more pronounced for households in Central China, Western China and provinces with high unemployment rates, as well as those supporting the elderly and without housing. This paper will serve as a reference to fuel high-quality employment and reduce difficulties for women in the context of digital transformation.