Working women face tough time in 30s

A RECENT survey by the China Youth Daily found more than 86 percent of those polled feel that career opportunities languish for women in their thirties.

Men accounted for 37.3 percent of the 1,973 respondents.

The glass ceiling, exclusion from major projects, and removal from positions or salary cuts during maternity leave are among difficulties that women in this age group have frequently encountered at the workplace, according to the survey.

Nearly 63 percent of respondents believe it is difficult for women in their 30s to climb higher up the ranks, while almost 60 percent say this age group has been cut off from major tasks or candidate pools in the workplace.

Cheng Jing (pseudonym), a 35-year-old employee with a foreign company in Shanghai, linked this to her pregnancy and childbirth. She feels she has continued to lose opportunities ever since she got pregnant.

“The early stage of my pregnancy coincided with a team assembling for a major project. As a veteran in the field, I should have been considered more competent,” said Cheng.

“But I was eliminated from the very beginning because the expected date of delivery fell within the project’s execution.”

After the baby was born, she had to spend significant time on childcare, which came at the expense of her job performance, said the mother of a two-year-old. Now she works in an auxiliary position.

Cheng is not the only one who decided to have a child in her 30s according to Wen Chenjing, a barrister who specializes in employment disputes and also sits on the Shanghai municipal bar association. The age from 30 to 39 is considered the reproductive peak for Chinese female professionals, said Wen, which has seen a notable divergence in their life trajectories in this period.

“We found that a large number of women temporarily left the workplace to bear and raise children in this period, while a similar number of them delayed childbirth for the sake of career development.”

Despite facing tougher odds after childbirth, women in their 30s have shown strong assertiveness in the survey.

(Xinhua)

Tourists buy cosmetics at the duty-free shop in Riyue Square in Haikou, south China’s Hainan Province. According to data from the General Administration of Customs, during the first week of the new offshore duty-free policy — which increases the quota — from July 1 to 7, total purchases by outbound tourists were 450 million yuan (US$64.26 million), with 65.71 million yuan tax-free and 9.39 million yuan tax-free per day, up 58.2 percent over the first half of the year. — Xinhua