Men enjoy significant advantage over women in Chinese government jobs, says study

As per a new research, men enjoy a significant advantage over women when they apply for any Chinese government jobs. The Inspection Squad for Workplace Gender Discrimination analysed the data of annual recruitment drive for the national civil service and discovered that more government positions were kept reserved for men in comparison to w omen.

The report, which was first published early in December, observed the job requirements for all government positions which were advertised in October, one month before the annual civil service exam which all candidates need to pass if they wish to secure a permanent government job.

It was found by the team that in around 40,000 jobs which were advertised, many had specified that they were “men-only” or “women-only” job opportunities. In these job opportunities, 10,981 jobs were earmarked for men in comparison to only 7,550 for women.

The difference between the two genders equates to around 8.7 per cent of all the jobs which were advertised. In the data’s further analysis, it was found that the situation of gender discrimination is worst in the provincial bureaus of central government agencies, like the People’s Bank of China or the Ministry of Railways, where more than 40 per cent of the job opportunities have gender preferences.

Among the different positions, only the revenue service, census, statistics and customs agencies have an even gender split while the others have been hiring more men than women.

“Those who do not take part in the exam or do not sign up for particular positions may not realise the obvious gender restrictions in the exam,” said the author of the report, who uses the alias Wang Lin. “We wanted to give an objective description of the situation,” he added, the South China Morning Post reported. 

Wang is among the group of volunteers who have been making efforts for the past nine years to improve workplace gender equality, using social media to mention in public examples of gender discrimination and filing complaints to government departments.

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This year, a record 2.83 million applicants applied to appear in the exams amid the sluggish economic recovery of the country, which topped the 2.5 million that signed up in 2022.

The South China Morning Post, while looking into the requirements for the applications of this year on the government’s website, found that many “remarks” which were mentioned under the postings included additional job requirements which were not mentioned in the official job description. 

In a few of these requirements, it was stated that the jobs are for fresh college graduates and for people, who have a particular skill set, however, many others mentioned that jobs are “men only” or “women only”.

(With inputs from agencies)