Companies must be encouraged to hire more women

Graduates from normal universities in Hunan province interact with their potential employers at a job fair in Hengyang in March. More than 4,000 graduates participated in the event.[Peng Bin/For China Daily]

A FEMALE PHD STUDENT from China Communication University in Beijing complained of gender discrimination after attending a job fair. China Youth Daily commented on Wednesday:

Companies will not sacrifice their profits, so the more the government promotes extending maternity leave and other benefits to encourage more women to have babies, the more businesses will resort to an "invisible threshold" in their recruitment.

As a result, State-owned enterprises or government institutions find female graduates flooding to take their entry examinations and interviews. It has long been the case that the number of female civil servants surpasses the number of male ones.

The overwhelming number of female employees burdens the State-owned enterprises so much that they cannot even allocate properly some tasks that should be given to male employees.

It is estimated that the different recruiting practices between private enterprises and SOEs will continue. For individual women, the ability to enter a relatively stable workplace is conducive to childbearing and domestic commitments. But in the long term, female employees becoming too concentrated in one place will affect the normal functioning of the work unit.

Rather than letting SOEs take the responsibility of hiring more women, we may wish to learn from the lessons of Russia and New Zealand which support and encourage fertility practices by offering maternity incentives, while bearing the costs for enterprises.