China has recently announced that it will be implementing a discrimination ban on gender, ethnicity, and religion, especially with regards to hiring practices, through new regulations issued by its Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, which will take effect as early as 1 March 2021.
These new regulations will require HR agencies, especially businesses that are heavily involved in the online recruitment sector, to secure the protection of their candidate’s personal information.
This will prevent such firms from leaking, altering, destroying or illegally selling the ID number, age, gender, address, contact and other personal information of their candidates.
To ensure the protection of the personal information of their candidates, these companies will also have to conduct annual security audits.
This is not the first time that the Chinese government is trying to alleviate discrimination during the job recruitment and hiring process, according to CGTN. Efforts have been previously made to counter a prevailing issue in many Chinese businesses who would often discriminate potential candidates based on factors that may be irrelevant to accomplishing the job tasks required of certain positions.
For example, many women were often overlooked during the recruitment process due to either strict traditionalist views or misperceived qualities. In 2020, over nine ministries spelled out that businesses should not exclude women in recruitment, reject women due to gender-related reasons, seek information like women’s marital status and pregnancy planning, restrict women from giving birth as a condition for employment, and raise the job selection criteria for women.
In a separate survey conducted by China News on Weibo surveying over 8,600 people, over 64.5 percent of respondents said they had faced discrimination in job hunting, while only 15 percent said they had never experienced gender discrimination.
Of those who faced discrimination, 54.5 percent said they were discriminated due to their gender, while 10 percent said they experienced other forms of discrimination.
