(Bloomberg) -- When Charlotte Yang was interviewing for a back office role at a top brokerage firm in China last year, she was asked about whether she planned to get married and have children — the same question directed to all the unmarried female candidates during the group interview. There was only one male candidate there, who eventually got the job. 

For Yang, who’s now 30 years old and ended up staying with her existing firm, it was not an unusual experience. She’s been asked about her family plans at almost every job interview ever since she graduated from university. 

She’s not alone. China’s finance firms overwhelmingly prefer men for entry-level roles such as researchers because they are seen as having more time to devote to work, said a Guangzhou-based recruiter for a local fund management company, who asked not to be identified because the issue is considered sensitive. The company, for example, requires master’s degrees for the jobs, meaning qualified female candidates are often in their mid- or late 20s, right around the average age women in China have their first child.

A survey of China’s postsecondary graduate job seekers released in May reveals that such hiring practice are widespread across professional fields, not just finance. It found that the more education women received, the less likely they were to get offers as compared with men. For postgraduates, the gender gap reached 21 percentage points: Fewer than half of women received job offers, compared with almost 70% for men, according to the survey conducted between March and April by Zhaopin Ltd., one of China’s largest online recruitment platforms. 

Women who face such discrimination have fewer options to seek legal redress than in other developed countries. While China encourages couples to have babies to boost its birth rate, there are few legal guardrails in place to protect women against discrimination and unfair treatment from employers if they have children. The overall result is less participation in the workforce and a weaker economy, according to Professor Susanne Choi, co-director of the Gender Research Centre at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

“China is one of the few countries in the world that has experienced a widening gender gap in labor force participation rate and wages,” said Choi, citing a research paper published by the International Monetary Fund that looks at data between 2000 and 2019. “This trend is very concerning.”

Demographic Crisis

China’s female labor force participation rate has been steadily declining since the 1990s. Raising the rate by 3 percentage points would deliver a $497 billion boost to the economy, equivalent to 2% of gross domestic product, according to a 2019 study by PwC. Such a bump would have even more of an impact now as the country’s economic recovery stalls following three years of Covid closures.

On top of a slowdown in manufacturing, real estate and consumer spending, China is facing a worsening demographic crisis that weighs on its long-term economic prospects. The population began shrinking in 2022 for the first time in six decades. Fewer people are remaining in the workforce because of an early official retirement age — 55 for women and 60 for men in white-collar roles  — and an increasingly low birth rate, which fell in 2021 to the lowest since 1950. 

To reverse the trend, China started to allow couples to have three children in 2021, after scrapping its decades-long one-child policy in 2016. But that has done little to encourage working women to have more children as the government stopped short of providing strong reassurance that employers won’t sideline or punish those who take the country’s 98 days of paid maternity leave.

The burden of childcare also largely falls on women in China, adding to private employers’ concerns that women’s productivity could be affected by their home responsibilities, Choi said. 

“What China needs is women workers, but gender discrimination will discourage married women from staying in the labor market and inhibit those who stay from realizing their full potential,” Choi said.

Career Impact

About 61% of women in China were asked about their marriage and childbirth plans during job interviews, while 47% of women believed family plans could negatively affect their careers, compared with 11% for men, according to another Zhaopin survey released in May. China Youth Daily has also reported on invasive questions during the interview process and bias toward hiring men.

The discrimination doesn’t end once a woman lands a job. Working mothers’ salaries were 26% lower than fathers’ in 2022, compared with the gender pay gap among all workers of 13%, according to Zhaopin. 

Job security is another concern. Even though she’s now been in her role for three years, Charlotte Yang says she could be the first out in a downturn.

“When our company’s business was bad, I was more worried about being laid off than anybody else because I was the only female in our team,” said Charlotte Yang. “If you are a woman of child-bearing age, you’ll just have to live with serious discrimination in the workplace.”

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