HONG KONG—Chinese women, especially highly qualified university graduates, are having a tough time finding work as they face a difficult economy and persistent discrimination, officials say.
“The overall employment situation is still bleak ... and outdated sexist attitudes still complicate things,” official media quoted All-China Women’s Federation (ACWF)’s head of development Cui Yu as saying.
ACWF figures also show that the proportion of female government employees has risen from 30 percent in 1995 to upwards of 40 percent today.
Recently, women have been promoted to mayoral office, and there are 6,700 female deputy mayors. Eight of China’s top leaders are women.
However, “gender-based discrimination is still an important factor,” said Cui, whose organization is closely linked with the ruling Communist Party at every level of government.
No enforcement power
Women account for 45 percent of the workforce in China, but according to Cui, China still lacks regulatory power to improve women’s employment rights.
Laws defining what constitutes sexual discrimination in the job-seeking process are vague, making life tough for highly qualified women graduates, she said.
Experts said the inequalities stem from the fact that Chinese women still have a low social status, particularly among the country’s 900 million rural residents.
“There are still fairly strong signs that Chinese women actually still suffer inequality in a lot of areas of life, including employment,” said Guizhou-based independent scholar Wu Yuqin.
“For example, companies seeking to hire university graduates still greatly prefer to hire men, although there may be some improvement on before.”
Commentators on the news site Sohu to the story featuring Cui Yu admitted that they avoid hiring female graduate staff where possible.
“If you look at their academic grades, they are far better than those of the men,” wrote a commenter with the nickname sz1016411so, who said he is a manager for a Guangzhou-based manufacturer.
“If you look at the prizes they have won and their participation in activities, on committees, in student organizations, in competitions, they outperform male graduates. But when it comes to work ... they are very inflexible in the way they do things, and they will always find excuses not to put in overtime,” he said.
Another commenter, yuxinmeiren 2010, said he too is a manager who prefers not to hire women.
“They are nowhere near as good as male employees. They refuse to do jobs they think are too dirty or too tiring,” he wrote.
Marriage seen as key
Wu said the attitude of employers has strengthened the view among Chinese women that whom they marry is more important than getting good grades in college.
“They are just thinking about money, and really they are dependent on men, and just want to find rich ones,” she said.
She said the scope of the ACWF to spark social change is limited.
“Everywhere in China has a Women’s Federation, at the district, municipal, or provincial level. They are all linked to the local Communist Party committee, so that, under one-party rule, it’s impossible have an organization that is truly independent,” she said.
“For example, domestic violence might get reported to the Women’s Federation, but then they might say that the woman wasn’t badly hurt, and not take the complaint seriously.”
Big inequities
New York-based legal scholar Ye Ning said it is impossible to improve the situation of China’s women without first addressing large-scale inequalities in society as a whole.
“We can be sure that the ACWF has gone to a great deal of effort to compile statistics on employment rates among Chinese women,” Ye said.
“But the cruelest figure there is that around 70 percent of China’s wealth is now concentrated in the hands of just 0.3 percent of its population.”
“Of the 3,000-odd billionaire families, 2,867 of them are family members of high-level government officials. This is a far more telling statistic, because it shows the sort of background against which the social status of Chinese women has already improved.”
Ye called on the ACWF to push Chinese society into “deeper reflection” on the status of women.
Original reporting in Mandarin by An Pei. Mandarin service director: Jennifer Chou. Translated and written for the Web in English by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Sarah Jackson-Han.