Women want discrimination tackled before having babies

More details needed on how third-child policy will protect rights, employment

After China announced on May 31 that all couples will be allowed to have three children, up from two, working mothers and young women are still waiting for more details on how the policy will be implemented and how their rights will be protected.

Many want to see the policy have a positive impact on correcting gender discrimination in workplaces before deciding to have another child.

Experts said their concerns are reasonable, reflect the professional predicament faced by many women, and highlight the urgent need to step up implementation of fertilityfriendly policies, such as promoting flexible working hours and improving legislation to tackle sex-based discrimination in employment.

Global phenomenon

Jia, a public relations manager in Shanghai who asked that her full name not be published, said that when she graduated from college in 2015, it was not uncommon to be asked in job interviews about whether she had a boyfriend, or whether she planned to get married or have children in the next few years.

“Of course I did not enjoy answering these inquiries because they had nothing to do with my qualifications and it felt like the company was not treating me as a competitive job candidate like they would treat a male counterpart,” she said.

After working in the advertising and marketing industry for nearly six years, she began to understand some companies’ reservations about hiring young women.

“I’d encountered a few colleagues who had to abruptly leave their positions after becoming pregnant. Some have returned but the priority of their lives has obviously turned to taking care of kids,” she said. “I wonder if there is any solution to this dilemma. Is working and having children so irreconcilable?

The answer is both yes and no, experts said.

Li Na, a professor at China University of Labor Relations, said the negative impact of fertility on female workforce participation is a global phenomenon and rearing children is bound to chip away at time devoted to work.

“Some working mothers who initially planned to just take some time off to raise children ultimately found themselves becoming fulltime mothers,” Li said. “The thirdchild policy will certainly add to the misgivings of employers, especially when it comes to giving promotions to or renewing labor contracts with female employees.”

The female labor participation rate in China is above the global average. In 2019, about 61 percent of Chinese women aged 15 or above were working, compared with 54 percent for Japan, 57 percent for the United States and 56 percent for Germany, data from the World Bank shows.

Biological burden

Striking a balance between home and work has been tough for them, which is one of the top three reasons many families decided not to have more children after the universal second-child policy took effect in 2016, the National Health Commission said on June 1.

Citing figures from a survey, the commission said: “About 34.3 percent of women said their earnings were cut after childbirth. Among them, 42.9 percent had their salaries cut by at least half.”

During an earlier interview with China News Service, Chang Kai, head of Renmin University of China’s Labor Relations Research Center, said it is very difficult for many enterprises to get rid of gender discrimination in the current social environment, and the traditional view that women should be responsible for household chores still hampers their employment.

“But the main problem is that existing rules and regulations aimed at protecting the rights of female workers are not very strict, and their implementation is weak,” he said.

Chang said women have to bear the biological burden of taking maternity leave and breast-feeding, which will drive up enterprises’ human resources costs.

“Governments are suggested to provide relevant subsidies to businesses, and step up social security and maternity insurance programs,” he said.

The coverage of maternity insurance has been rising in recent years. The National Healthcare Security Administration said recently that about 235 million people had enrolled in maternity insurance programs last year, up by 10 percent from 2019. Maternity insurance, paid for by employers and local governments, reimburses women who leave work to give birth.

But, based on experiences in other countries, it’s not enough to dispel employers’ misgivings, Li said. “A feasible solution adopted by Germany is to use funds from the national social security or medical insurance programs to make up the balance (of insurance premiums), instead of asking employers to shoulder the burden,” she said.

In addition to maternity leave, Li added, favorable policies such as paternity leave and parental leave, have not been embraced or enforced strongly enough.

“The rollout of paternity leave is meant to lessen discrimination against women, but it is not clear who will pay the salaries of male employees during their time off. As a result, both employers and employees are lukewarm about it,” she said.

Li said detailed regulations are also needed on how to implement parental leave, as the country is encouraging capable regions to launch trial programs.

“Parental leave usually lasts one to three years and can effectively solve the issue of rearing children before they are sent to kindergarten at 3 years old,” she said.

Innovative approaches

Li said some key questions remain, including how payment should be arranged during such leave, how to prevent men from shifting all responsibilities for raising children to women and how to coordinate parents’ eventual return to the job market and work.

More can be done to address these issues, she said.

Another promising approach is to promote flexible working schedules, Li said. “If a husband and a wife can stagger their working hours, they can resolve the conflict between work and home,” she said.

Li Jia, deputy head of the aging society research center at Pangoal Institution, a Beijing-based public policy think tank, told China Business Journal that paternity leave is only a supplemental approach, and the core solution is to promote “integration of work and home”, such as working from home.

“The shift also involves legal issues, such as how to draft contracts with homebound workers and how to protect the rights of both parties in this context,” he added.

A guideline released by the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security and eight other government departments in February 2019 banned any form of discrimination against women at work, including setting higher bars for or rejecting female candidates, and asking them to reveal their marital status or childbearing plans.

Li Na, from China University of Labor Relations, said more forceful and detailed laws against gender discrimination at work should be established.

“Existing regulations are too general,” she said. “Gender discrimination can be very implicit, and we need stronger efforts and skills to detect it.”