Chinese firms to tackle sexism

– Chinese tech firms pledged on Monday to tackle gender bias in recruitment after a rights group said they routinely favoured male candidates, luring applicants with the promise of working with “beautiful girls” in job adverts.

A Human Rights Watch (HRW) report found that major technology companies, including Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent, had widely used “gender discriminatory job advertisements”, which said men were preferred or specifically barred women applicants.

Some adverts promised candidates they would work with “beautiful girls” and “goddesses”, HRW said in a report based on an analysis of 36 000 job posts between 2013 and 2018.

Tencent, which runs China’s most popular messenger app WeChat, apologised for the adverts after the HRW report was published on Monday.

“We are sorry they occurred and we will take swift action to ensure they do not happen again,” a Tencent spokesperson told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.