Ministry takes aim at gender bias
China's educational authorities recently announced a ban forbidding employers from setting discriminatory requirements on campus recruitment, including restrictions on gender and ethnicity.
The Ministry of Education released the notice on its official website on Friday, asking all colleges and universities to improve the work of finding employment for graduates in 2016.
The notice reads that employers should not impose limitations on employees' gender, ethnicity or the university from which they graduated.
"Adding conditions like gender, marital status or fertility status into job requirements hurts applicants' rights to equal employment. Although the laws and regulations ban any kind of discriminatory information on recruitment advertisements, employers could still reject female applicants in practice," Zhou Hao, a lawyer from the Beijing-based Jia An Law Office, told the Global Times.
"Gender discrimination is not uncommon in job hunting. It is a harmful tradition for some employers to think that male employees can bring more economic benefits while female employees' work may be interrupted by childbirth," Wang Jiangsong, a professor at China Institute of Industrial Relations, told the Global Times on Sunday.
Wang said that some female prospective workers have little awareness of the discrimination they have to contend with during the job hunt, which makes gender discrimination worse.
Although some enterprises choose not to write limitations on gender into hiring requirements, they will ask female applicants about their marital and fertility status in later interviews, Nanjing-based Modern Express reported on December 6.
Zhou said that the government needs to introduce more detailed rules and regulations - including punishments for those who violate rights to equal employment - to decrease recruitment discrimination.
According to a survey of campus recruitment advertisements posted on job-hunting website zhaopin.com between September 2013 and September 2014, 127 advertisements contained obvious gender discrimination, using phrases such as"males only" or "females only," media outlet sina.com reported in 2014.
Industries like manufacturing, trade, wholesale and retail, IT and real estate showed the most gender discrimination, said sina.com. State-owned enterprises and public institutions constitute play a major role in gender discrimination.
Xiong Bingqi, a Shanghai-based education expert, stressed the need for forceful supervision of gender discrimination, despite the inclusion of statements against gender discrimination in existing laws, news site chinanews.com reported in 2014.
