While modern Chinese society has been making efforts for gender equality, much of Chinese culture is modeled after traditional Chinese values that emphasize strong gender roles. The terms Yin and Yang, Yin, or the feminine aspect, is described as weak, passive, and soft while Yang, or the masculine aspect, is depicted as dominating, assertive, and hard. Traditionally in China, Yang was always more dominate over Yang and lead to a male dominated household. This had a major influence on the thought that women were meant to follow the lead of the men in the household. At first, they were taught to be subservient to their father and brothers, and then once they married, that position was taken over by the husband. The woman’s entire purpose was to produce a male heir. The only time in which a woman was able to run the household was if her husband died and her son was not old enough to take over. The roles of Yin and Yang are also accountable to the high male birth rates in China due to the fact that males have all the power and therefore are the most desirable. Because of this, when China introduced the One Child Policy, people in China went out of their way in order to ensure that their one child was male. Thus leading to a huge surge in the adoption of Chinese girls in the 90s and a severely male dominated society today.
While modern day Chinese women have entered the workforce, it is still a severely male dominated environment. While the Chinese government has put in place legal and policy reforms in order to improve employment discrimination in the workforce, oftentimes there is not adequate enforcement of these policies and conflicting government policies can appear to promote the continuation of discriminatory practices as opposed to discouraging them. The practice of gender-based quotas and enrollment policies in higher education has resulted in women having to get better scores than men when taking entrance exams. When it comes to entry into the workforce in jobs seen as “male” environments, women have a very hard time finding work. Oftentimes job openings advertise white collar jobs for men while advertising sales and clerical positions for women.
Not only do women have to get better scores and search harder for jobs, they also have hoops such as maximum age, minimum height, and other physical preferences to jump through. Discrimination based on appearance is commonplace when hiring women for various positions. In addition, the Chances Labor law and Regulations on the Scope of Prohibited Labour for Female Workers further enforce the idea that women are weak by explicitly banning women from physically demanding jobs, such as logging, underground mining, or setting up power lines, and prohibiting menstruating, pregnant, or lactating women from doing certain jobs as well.