Sexist adverts and fear of maternity leave: how gender inequality in China’s job market is ‘getting worse’
Seeking train conductors with normal faces among the cases cited as report suggests that China is going backwards on discrimination
When Erica Shu, a University of Hong Kong final year student, arrived for her internship at a Shanghai brokerage last year, she was shocked to find just one woman aged under 30 among the 30 people working in the investment department.
She said other employees later told her that the department had stopped hiring women two years earlier because female candidates had “low value” in the finance industry.
Women would be filtered out during the hiring process, because managers believed they would not be able to cope with the job’s long hours and frequent business trips.
“I only realised then how different the working environment on the mainland is,” Shu, who is from the mainland, told the South China Morning Post.
Despite rapid economic growth and a rising education level among women over the past few decades, gender discrimination in the Chinese job market and workplace shows no sign of improvement, according to a Human Rights Watch report released on Monday.
The report, Only Men Need Apply, said gender discrimination is common in both the public and private sectors and in some cases is worsening.
