China

'Men only' job adverts prompt women's rights group in China to take on employers over gender discrimination


By day, Bai Zhi is a white-collar worker, researching and writing reports about business for a large Beijing corporation. By night, she is an online vigilante, hunting down gender discrimination in recruitment advertisements and Chinese workplaces. 

The 27-year-old career woman, who has used an alias for the past seven years to avoid detection, is one of the founders of the “Inspection Squad for Workplace Gender Discrimination”.

She says the squad, which now has 74 members, aims to empower women, and build a platform for improved workplace communication.

She admits it is a difficult battle. China’s labour laws state that employment policies should not discriminate based on gender, but local government bureaus interpret the laws in different ways, Bai said. 

She said some local bureaus think it’s not their duty to supervise advertisements, and that it’s up to complainants to sue companies for discrimination . Most of the time, the complaint letters to companies are met with silence, “like a stone dropped into the ocean”, Bai says. 

The few that do respond positively change the wording of the job ads, but the squad can’t tell if the companies merely refrain from publicly saying “men only” while engaging in discrimination in practice. 

Bai said the squad was formed in 2014 when she was a university student and joined a few social media groups focused on social justice. 

In one group on WeChat, she came across a discussion about launching a campaign against companies that engaged in gender discrimination in their job advertisements. 

“I searched on China’s recruitment sites, such as zhaopin.com  or 51job.com , entering the keyword ‘male’, and would see dozens of pages of search results that listed ‘male only’,” she told the Post

Intrigued, she signed up for the campaign. Along with six others, Bai compiled information from the recruitment sites and wrote complaints to government officers. 

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The members of the campaign received some promising results from their complaints, with some companies changing the wording of their job advertisements. Others denied they had engaged in gender discrimination. 

The volunteers wanted to make the replies from companies public to generate community awareness and perhaps spark a response from the authorities. In October 2014, they launched the Weibo account “Inspection Squad for Workplace Gender Discrimination”. 

They gained 490,000 followers, as well as credibility, and interest from users, who would report cases of gender discrimination.

The squad is now roughly divided into 10 teams; some work to verify complaints from the public, and report incidents of gender discrimination to authorities and the public, some write weekly and monthly reports, while others collect data and engage in social activism. 

One member, a university student who goes by the alias Hepburn, says her volunteer work on the squad stems from her dissatisfaction with how she was treated by her own family. Hepburn grew up in Guangdong, a southern province in China, where the traditional view that men are superior is still widely held. 

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From a young age, she was aware that her family members favoured her male cousin, but only in middle school realised this was gender discrimination. 

“My grandparents were really fond of my cousin, and their words and actions towards me showed an obvious attitude difference,” she said. 

The complaints she has investigated include that of a university student who received recruitment information from her teacher that stated preferences for men, and companies that advertise for “male-only” applicants. 

Sometimes the cases are more subtle. “We’ve come across ads that say ‘men under 35, women under 30’,” Hepburn said. “The requirement should be entirely the same across the board.”

After verifying the cases, the squad files complaints with the local offices of the Bureau of Human Resources and the Department of Social Security and the All China Women’s Federation. 

Of the thousands of cases the campaign has highlighted, Bai says only two resulted in companies being fined for gender discrimination. 

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“There’s a low legal cost for the companies,” she said. “Even if the local government launched an investigation, if there’s no punishment they could change their ads this time but keep publishing [the offending ones] in the future.”

Despite the challenges, Bai says she’s happy to see rising public awareness of gender discrimination issues, and is always keen for more volunteers to join the campaign.

The growth of the campaign group has coincided with the emergence of a feminist movement in China. 

In 2015, a Beijing woman, Ma Hu, won the first gender discrimination employment case in China, after her job application was rejected by a branch of Express Mail Service on the grounds the job required workers to carry heavy packages. 

She had told the media previously she wanted an apology and a change in attitude from the company. 

As more women speak out, including comedian Yang Li , who mocks men’s ego on stage, men have hit back. 

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Chu Yin, a law professor in Beijing and one of Yang’s most vehement detractors, recorded two videos in response to her show, calling her “ugly without make-up”. 

Others attempted to censor her, reporting her to authorities for “damaging social harmony”. 

Bai’s campaign team has been accused on social media of pitting women against men. “Can women work at a construction site? Can they lift heavy items?” one retorted.

“You get pregnant as soon as you enter a company , how can you work?” wrote another. 

“If you want gender equality, you start your own company and you can hire all the female staff you want,” wrote another commenter.

The squad is unperturbed, and hit back in a report that compiled news reports about women suffering from gender discrimination at work, and explained the “motherhood penalty” – the inferior pay and benefits working mothers receive and the negative perceptions of their competence they encounter. 

This article was first published in South China Morning Post.



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