The Ministry of Education released a notice on Friday that bans employers from setting discriminatory requirements on campus recruitment, stressing current restrictions on gender and ethnicity, according to a report by the Global Times.
The notice states that employers should not limit their hiring based on a potential employee's gender, ethnicity or the university from which he or she graduated.
"Adding conditions like gender, marital status or fertility status into job requirements hurts applicants' rights to equal employment," said Zhou Hao, a lawyer based in Beijing. "Although the laws and regulations ban any kind of discriminatory information on recruitment advertisements, employers could still reject female applicants in practice."
According to Wang Jiangsong, a professor at China Institute of Industrial Relations, "gender discrimination is not uncommon in job hunting. It is a harmful tradition for some employers to think that male employees can bring more economic benefits while female employees' work may be interrupted by childbirth."
Wang said that a good number of women in the workforce are not aware of the discrimination they face during their job hunt.
While some enterprises choose not to explicitly place limitations on gender into their hiring requirements, they will ask female applicants regarding their marital and fertility status in later interviews, according to a Dec. 6 report by Modern Express.
Zhou said that it is up to the government to introduce more detailed rules and regulations to decrease discrimination in recruitment.
Sina.com reported in 2014 that 127 advertisements posted between Sept. 2013 and Sept. 2014 on zhaopin.com contained blatant discrimination, featuring phrases like "males only" or "females only."
Even on the job, gender discrimination is still present.
A March report from Ganji.com report showed that 46 percent of women who were polled have suffered from employment and promotion discrimination.