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Chinese Tech Companies Post Men-Only Job Listings, Report Finds (theverge.com)
Major Chinese tech companies like Huawei, Alibaba, and Tencent discriminate against women in their online job listings, a new report from Human Rights Watch found today. Some job postings directly state they are for men only, while others specify that women must have attractive appearances and even be a certain height. The Verge reports: The Human Rights Watch report reveals gender discrimination amongst major tech companies, as in the rest of Chinese society, is common and widespread. Search engine Baidu listed a job for content reviewers in March 2017 stating that applicants had to be men with the "strong ability to work under pressure, able to work on weekends, holidays and night shifts." The conglomerate Tencent, which owns WeChat, the massive game Honor of Kings, and a majority stake in League of Legends, was found to have posted an ad for a sports content editor in March 2017, stating it was looking for "strong men who are able to work nightshifts."
And Alibaba, despite Jack Ma touting the company's inclusiveness, merited an entire case study from the Human Rights Watch report. The report noted the e-commerce giant came under fire in 2015 for posting a job ad on its site for a "computer programmer's motivator" seeking women applicants with physical characteristics like Japanese adult film star Sola Aoi. Alibaba removed the reference to Sola Aoi after media reported on it, but kept the ad on the site. As recently as January this year, Alibaba still mentioned "men preferred" in job listings for "restaurant operations support specialist" positions. Tech companies also often tout the attractive women they've hired as incentives for more men to come on board, according to the HRW report. Both Tencent and Baidu were noted to have posted to their social media accounts interviews with male employees who cited having beautiful women around them as an incentive for working there.
And Alibaba, despite Jack Ma touting the company's inclusiveness, merited an entire case study from the Human Rights Watch report. The report noted the e-commerce giant came under fire in 2015 for posting a job ad on its site for a "computer programmer's motivator" seeking women applicants with physical characteristics like Japanese adult film star Sola Aoi. Alibaba removed the reference to Sola Aoi after media reported on it, but kept the ad on the site. As recently as January this year, Alibaba still mentioned "men preferred" in job listings for "restaurant operations support specialist" positions. Tech companies also often tout the attractive women they've hired as incentives for more men to come on board, according to the HRW report. Both Tencent and Baidu were noted to have posted to their social media accounts interviews with male employees who cited having beautiful women around them as an incentive for working there.
Case in point below. The founder eventually concluded that it was a bad idea from the standpoint of productivity, but it never seems to have occurred to her that her policy was deeply sexist.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/fem...
This isn't really news to anyone who has lived in China. Someone has found a tech angle to grab headlines, but a more accurate encapsulation would be, "Labor market discrimination is legal and open in China." I lived in China for four years; I'm white, my wife is Indian. There were all kinds of "hire-a-foreigner" jobs (mostly teaching English but a range of other things) that were open to me but not to her, and they were advertised as such. (As opposed to the West I guess where they just don't call you back -- but still, it's worse.) If you want to see some of these postings. go to thebeijinger.com and scroll through the help wanted ads. Some of these postings are for US-headquartered companies, which possibly makes them a violation of US labor law, if anyone wants to pursue that. In the Chinese-language job boards, things can be even weirder. Even the train system openly said that they were looking for women in their 20s as train attendants for the high-speed railway. And that's the government doing the hiring. There isn't any kind of social consensus that discrimination is a bad thing (though plenty of people think it is), so don't expect it to change soon.