MCLC: Gender discrimination in job ads in China

[MCLC LIST]

MCLC LIST
Gender discrimination in job ads in China
Source: Human Rights Watch (4/23/18)
“Only Men Need Apply”: Gender Discrimination in Job Advertisements in China
简体中文
Four decades of rapid economic growth in China have created unprecedented economic opportunities for women, but gender discrimination in employment remains widespread.
By some key measures, the problem is getting worse: a smaller proportion of women are working. Only 63 percent of the female labor force worked in 2017, down from 65.5 percent ten years earlier. The gender gap in labor force participation has also grown. While the women’s labor force participation rate was 83 percent in 2007, it had dropped to 81 percent of the male rate by 2017. The pay gap in urban areas has also increased. And according to a report by the World Economic Forum, China’s gender parity ranking in 2017 fell for the ninth consecutive year, leaving China in 100th place out of the 144 countries surveyed (in 2008 China had ranked 57th).
Discrimination in hiring is one important reason for the gender gap, a phenomenon on clear public display in employment recruiting advertisements, as detailed in this report. Government and private sector job ads often specify a requirement or preference for men, which affects both who applies and ultimately who gets hired. While such discriminatory practices are rife in common low-paying jobs such as security guard, there are also widespread in ads for high-paying and prestigious positions.
Job ad example 2:
A message posted on Alibaba’s official Weibo account on March 7, 2013. (The message is still on the company’s website as of February 4, 2018.)
[March 8, recruitment notice season 1: the call from goddesses] They are the goddesses in Alibaba employees’ heart—smart and competent at work and charming and alluring in life. They are independent but not proud, sensitive but not melodramatic. They want to be your coworkers. Do you want to be theirs? … (More job positions: [a link to Alibaba’s hiring website here])
In recent national civil service job lists, 13 percent (2017) and 19 percent (2018) of the job postings specified “men only,” “men preferred,” or “suitable for men.” (Significantly, none specified “women only,” “women preferred,” or “suitable for women” in the 2017 list and one specified a preference for woman in the 2018 list.) Fifty-five percent of the jobs the Ministry of Public Security advertised in 2017 specified “men only.” For instance, a posting for a job at the ministry’s news department read, “need to work overtime frequently, high intensity work, only men need apply.” When women are not categorically excluded, many job ads require female applicants to be married with children. In May 2017, a recruiter posted a job ad on her social media account and noted, “[Applicants must be] women married with children or men.”
These job ads reflect traditional and deeply discriminatory views: that women are less physically, intellectually, and psychologically capable than men; that women are their families’ primary sources of child care and thus unable to be fully committed to their jobs or will eventually leave full-time paid employment to have a family; and that accommodating maternity leave is unacceptably inconvenient or costly for the company or agency.
In a few cases, the preference or requirement for men is a result of concerns that in certain fields, such as the civil service and primary school teaching, there are not enough male employees. Some local governments have published discriminatory ads to recruit more male kindergarten teachers because, as one kindergarten principle said, “The lack of males makes children prone to look at and solve problems according to the way women think and behave.”
Sexual objectification of women—treating women as a mere object of sexual desire—is prevalent in Chinese job advertising. Some job postings require women to have certain physical attributes—with respect to height, weight, voice, or facial appearance—that are completely irrelevant to the execution of job duties. For example, a job ad for train conductors in Hebei province required female applicants to be between “162 centimeters to 173 centimeters” tall, have a bodyweight “below 65 kilograms,” and have “normal facial features, no tattoos, no obvious scars on face, neck or arms, good skin tone, no incurable skin conditions.”
Some job postings use the physical attributes of women—often with photos of the company’s current employees—to attract male applicants. In recent years China’s biggest technology companies, such as Tencent, Baidu, and Alibaba, have repeatedly published recruitment ads boasting that there are “beautiful girls” (美女) or “goddesses” (女神) working for the companies. A Tencent male employee is featured stating this is the primary reason he joined Tencent and a Baidu male employee saying it is one reason why he is “so happy every day” at work. Alibaba’s recruitment social media account posted at midnight a series of photos of several young female employees and described them as “late night benefits.”
As a state party to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), China is obligated to eliminate all forms of discrimination in political, economic, social, and cultural spheres. International human rights law not only protects individuals from violations by state officials, but also from the government’s failure to protect individuals from abuses by private individuals.
Although Chinese laws ban gender discrimination in hiring and gender discriminatory content in advertising, the laws lack a clear definition of what constitutes gender discrimination, and provide few effective enforcement mechanisms. As a result, the level of enforcement is low and Chinese authorities rarely proactively investigate companies that repeatedly violate relevant laws.
Victims of discrimination or ordinary citizens can make complaints to local Bureaus of Human Resources and Social Security for discrimination in hiring and to bureaus of industry and commerce for discrimination in advertising, but the bureaus’ responses to complaints are irregular, inconsistent and, when they do take action, largely inconsequential. Authorities rarely penalize companies for discriminatory job ads, often only requiring them to change the ads. Women’s rights activists estimate that only a tiny percentage of the companies who have been investigated by the government for publishing discriminatory job ads have been fined.
Some women in recent years have brought successful court challenges to gender discrimination in job ads, but the compensation the companies were ordered to pay was low: in three separate court cases, the victims were each awarded 2,000 yuan (US$300). For many firms, such modest fines are unlikely to serve as a deterrent.
The Chinese government’s stringent media censorship and hostility toward grassroots activism pose a significant obstacle to Chinese women’s rights activists and civil society groups seeking to raise public awareness about the issue. Activists have pledged that they will continue to fight discriminatory job ads, but in China’s current climate they face increasing risks of reprisals for their activism.
by denton.2 at osu.edu on April 25, 2018
You are subscribed to email updates from MCLC Resource Center
To stop receiving these emails, click here.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.osu.edu/pipermail/mclc/attachments/20180425/c5e1256c/attachment-0001.html>