Men are in favor of job seeking: Employers do not like maternity leave

Statistic shows that men are preferred in job advertisement, female candidates have 'lower value'

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.

“In essence, things are getting worse,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. “If you look at labour force participation, if you look at the gap between women’s participation and men’s participation, if you look at gender parity, everything is going in the wrong direction. This is an issue that affects 700 million people.”

The discrimination ranged from not being considered for positions to demands that they comply with certain physical traits, the report stated.

For example, 13 per cent of the jobs on last year’s national civil service list specified “men only”, “men preferred” or “suitable for men”. This year the proportion had risen to 19 per cent, the report said.

None of the jobs last year specified a preference for women, and only one did so this year. “Rather than showing leadership to combat this gender discrimination in advertising, the government is indulging and actually fuelling it,” said Roth. “If the official job recruitment adverts show these signs, it’s a signal to companies that it is OK to do this.”

In the private sector, the report singled out several tech companies, including Tencent, Alibaba, Meituan and Baidu, for advertising jobs reserved for men. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.