One job ad for Chinese high-speed train conductors called for candidates who were “fashionable and beautiful.” Another ad targeting men for a job in a Chinese Internet company included photographs of a female employee pole-dancing.
Gender discrimination is widespread in the Chinese workforce, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said yesterday, with many hiring advertisements openly calling only for male applicants and using the attractiveness of female workers as a draw.
HRW released its report, Only Men Need Apply: Gender Discrimination in Job Advertisements in China, after looking at more than 36,000 job advertisements posted between 2013 and this year from recruiters, companies and the government.
Photo: AFP
“Sexist job ads pander to the antiquated stereotypes that persist within Chinese companies,” HRW China director Sophie Richardson said in a statement.
“These companies pride themselves on being forces of modernity and progress, yet they fall back on such [old-fashioned] recruitment strategies,” she said.
China bans discrimination in hiring and job advertising, but enforcement is weak.
Government departments are among the offenders, according to the report, with 55 percent of jobs advertised by the Chinese Ministry of Public Security last year specifying “men only.”
The ministry did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Discriminatory hiring practices further widen gaps in both female work participation and pay levels, according to official data, with urban female workers making just 67 percent of what men made in 2010, down from 78 percent in 1990 — a time when the government was loosening control over the economy.
It is also a reflection of “deeply discriminatory views about women,” the report said, including that they are less capable than men, or that they are not fully committed to their jobs because some will eventually leave their positions to have a family.
In examining the tech sector, the report pointed to numerous cases where the attractiveness and availability of female workers is used as an inducement for men to apply for jobs.
In one case, online shopping giant Alibaba Group Holding (阿里巴巴) ran an ad on its official microblog in 2013 enumerating the attributes of its female workers, accompanied by photos of female employees “in sexualized poses, including one engaged in pole dancing,” the report said.
Alibaba did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
An October 2016 article on the official microblog recruitment account of Tencent Holdings (騰訊) was even blunter, quoting a male employee as saying: “The reason I joined Tencent originated from a primal impulse. It was mainly because the ladies at human resources and that interviewed me were very pretty.”
Tencent apologized, saying the company values diverse backgrounds and recruits staff based on talent and ability.
“These incidents clearly do not reflect our values,” the tech giant said in an e-mail. “We have investigated these incidents and are making immediate changes. We are sorry they occurred and we will take swift action to ensure they do not happen again.”
Despite laws against it, demands are frequently made for physical attributes that have nothing to do with the requirements of the job, another form of sexual objectification.
Those can include minimums and maximums for height and weight, “normal facial features” and particular sounding voices.
One notable ad in northern China even called for “fashionable and beautiful high-speed train conductors,” the report said.
The HRW report also cited a 2014 study by the official All-China Women’s Federation in which 87 percent of female college graduates said they had faced at least one form of gender discrimination when applying for jobs.
“Instead of harassing and jailing women’s rights activists, the Chinese government should engage them as allies in combating gender discrimination in the job market — and beyond,” Richardson said.
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