Breaking through the glass ceiling

Source: China Real Time, WSJ (11/11/16)
Tips on Breaking Through the Glass Ceiling in China
By Josh Chin

A woman passed delivery workers sorting parcels near office buildings in Beijing on Friday.

A woman passed delivery workers sorting parcels near office buildings in Beijing on Friday. PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS

Chinese women who want to be paid closer to what men earn should get PhDs and move to big cities, according to a new study.

The study found that Chinese women this year made an average of nearly 4,500 yuan ($660) a month. That is 22.3% less than the male average.

Women with only a high school diploma made 33% less than men in the same roles. But women with PhDs—only 16.7% less.

“The importance of pursuing higher education in helping women change their fates is once again confirmed,” concluded researchers at recruitment company Boss Zhipin, whose iPhone app lets job seekers chat in real time with prospective bosses.

Moving to the big city also helps. Women in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen trailed their male counterparts by less than 20% on average, versus 31% in second- and third-tier cities, the survey found.

The survey, based on data from more than 360,000 jobs reported on Boss Zhipin’s platform, sheds new light on women’s pay in the world’s second-largest economy.

Crunching the data, Boss Zhipin researchers found differences in industry, region, education and work level accounted for 56% of the pay difference with men. The rest “can be understood as a result of the gender gap and discrimination,” the company said.

Women’s treatment in the workplace is a fraught topic in China. Thanks to Mao Zedong’s championing of women workers in the early years of Communist Party rule, Chinese women often enjoy higher social and economic status than their counterparts in more advanced Asian nations like Japan and South Korea. But scholars and women’s rights activists say that status had eroded in the decades since the party embraced a market economy.

Historical data reported by state media shows women made only 67.3% of what men did in 2010 compared with 77.5% in 1990. The Boss Zhipin numbers for this year suggest China may have returned again to the 1990 level. But challenges remain.

It isn’t uncommon for hiring managers to reject female job applicants they fear might get pregnant soon. Last year, a company in central China’s Henan province sparked debate with a leaked notice to female employees demanding they get pregnant on schedule.

Boss Zhipin noted that China’s new policy of encouraging women to have more children, including by extending maternity leave, could add to the challenges they face in the workplace.

“Large amounts of data show that women’s employment rates and salaries have a major impact on economic vitality,” the company says, but policies to encourage improvements for women, like more paternity leave and subsidies for preschool, “are still waiting to be implemented.”

According to Boss Zhipin, the wage gap is biggest in the medical field, where average salaries for men were 35.6% higher. The gap is also large in media, mobile internet and gaming. It is smaller in the higher education, insurance and environmental sectors.

The report does offer a few bright spots for Chinese women. It notes, for example, that women beat men handily in foreign language training, where they earn 21.5% more on average (in a field with few men.) Women also have higher salaries in fashion and real estate sales, the survey found.

The report sparked controversy on Chinese social media, where several users argued that men gave significant chunks of their salaries to their wives or girlfriends.

“Women’s hidden income is high, men have a lot of hidden outlays,” read one of the more popular responses to the survey on the Weibo microblogging platform.

China is by no means alone among major economies in struggling to close the gender pay gap. In the U.S., the gap is at its smallest point on record. Still, American women still take home less than 80% of what their male counterparts men do, according to the latest Census Bureau figures. The average figure for countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development was just under 85% in 2013.

In China, highly educated women are sometimes referred to as the “third gender” because they allegedly scare off men romantically. Yet their education clearly has other benefits, the report concludes.

– Josh Chin. Follow him on Twitter @joshchin 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *