Sexual harassment in China’s male-dominated civil service accepted as the norm, observers say
- Fifth of vacancies on latest public sector jobs list off limits to women
- Career stereotypes need to be broken, Human Rights Watch says
Sexual harassment and gender discrimination are rampant in Chinese government jobs, according to a study by an international rights group, which called for an equitable workspace and speedy resolution of misconduct complaints.
At an annual government recruitment programme last month, Beijing published a list of nearly 10,000 job openings for 2019, of which almost 20 per cent were effectively off limits to women, according to Human Rights Watch. The descriptions of the positions, which included some of the most sought-after jobs in the country, used phrases such as “men only”, “men preferred”, or “suitable for men”.
The proportion of these “men-only” jobs was about the same as it was on an equivalent list published by the government last year, which in turn was up from about 13 per cent in 2016.
Li Ying, director of the Yuanzhong Gender Development Centre in Beijing, said that while gender discrimination at work was a global issue, the situation in China was more severe than in Western countries because Chinese women were widely expected to shoulder the burden of domestic work.
“The whole of society expects women to do most of the daily chores, and the reality is, we’re doing so,” she said.
The lack of support services like baby feeding facilities in the workplace and grass-roots child care organisations were also contributing to the problem, she said.
A woman who works as a customs officer in Beijing said that when she joined the service through the national civil servant recruitment programme more than a decade ago, about half of the new intake were women. In the years since, most of the men she joined with had been promoted, while almost all of the women, including herself, had stayed where they were.