While teaching in Beijing in 1991 and 1993,1 sometimes became silently impatient with the contradictory demands of my female students. ‘They don't want to be “iron women”, uncomplainingly shouldering the burdens of career and household, but they want equality; they don't want demanding or difficult jobs but they want promotion; they dislike physical activity and outside work’. ‘Dammit’, I remember thinking, ‘don't these students realise that life isn't like that for women?’ Suddenly I realised that my impatience was built on my totally implicit acceptance of an equality framework when thinking about women's rights. In Australia feminists tend to accept that women must play by the overt rules of meritocracy (even if men do not); women's advancement is based on being as good as or better than men. My Chinese students were asking to be treated like their less-qualified male classmates, to receive the advantages life offered even if they did not ‘deserve’ them in terms of some notion of equal reward for equal merit or equal exertion. And, of course, they were also using the idea of women's difference, weaker and more feminine, to support some of their wishes.