Family or Self: Female Individualization and its Implication on Social Work in Hong Kong

Female individualization has become a telling issue in the intellectual fields especially when, as argued, the society has experienced the later stage of reflexive modernization. The issue can be particularly challenging in the East Asia due to its deep-rooted strong adherence to traditional culture which emphasizes on group and collective orientation as well as taken-for-granted assumption on female roles. The present study focused on the women in Hong Kong and tried to explore the characteristics of current life course based on a survey conducted in late 2011. The findings indicated that women began to postpone, rather than abandoning, the conventional life course arrangements, especially among the younger 1980s cohort. Nevertheless, the majority of women would still comply with the conventional and given family perception and life course assignments. Hence, the course of female individualization was intertwined with the mixture of women’s self-reflexivity and traditional belief. In response, we suggested that social work and social service intervention have to be fully informed with and alert with such ambivalent or even self-contradicting awareness pattern, and flexible enough to give due recognitions to women’s different needs in different life course stages and tasks.