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The gendered effects of substance use on employment stability in transitional China

ABSTRACT Substance use is often thought to harm employment prospects, an assumption challenged by the anomaly that people who use licit substances such as alcohol and tobacco are sometimes at a lower risk of unemployment. We argue that employment stability may benefit from the socialisation afforded through using licit substances, particularly in a context where licit substance use is encouraged. Furthermore, because the norms associated with substance use often reflect the gender hierarchy in a society, the impact of substance use on employment stability may be contingent on an individual's gender. Applying Cox proportional hazard modelling to a panel dataset during the critical two decades of China's market-based transition (1991–2011), we found that the impact of substance use on unemployment hazards varies depending on the dosage of the use and the gender of the users. Compared to abstinence, moderate alcohol-drinking reduces the risk of unemployment, and the reduction benefits especially men. The standalone effect of tobacco-smoking is to elevate unemployment hazards; however, this effect is heavily moderated by gender so that female smokers were penalised while male smokers were rewarded in the labour market. Such patterns cannot be explained by community-level modernisation progress and individual-level covariates.