Huang Min (pseudonym), a senior student at the China Youth University for Political Sciences, was excited to be getting closer to an excellent job as a public servant.
The excitement, however, was soon replaced by a sick feeling when the doctor demanded to examine her genitals and asked about her menstruation, insisting it was part of the compulsory medical checkup required for public service positions.
“What does it have to do with the job?” Huang complained to the media. “Is a woman whose menstruation starts on the first day of the month more capable than someone whose period comes on the 10th?”
Her complaints were echoed by many other female applicants who had undergone similar experiences on their way to becoming civil servants.
“I felt a bit embarrassed and confused when the doctor asked me when my first period and most recent period were,” said Zhang Duting, a 26-year-old single woman, recalling her physical checkups in 2010 for her current job at a Shanghai government department.
“As well, married women applicants who came with me to the designated hospital were required to complete a complicated gynecological examination,” she told the Global Times last week.
Unfair standards
The country’s controversial government recruitment system was again dragged into the public eye last week after Beijing Yirenping Center, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting social justice and public health, criticized it as “indirect gender discrimination and possible privacy infringement.”
It pointed out that the results of current invasive and extensive medical checkups on women’s reproductive organs are not included in the national examination standards and are embarrassing for the applicants, according to a letter the center sent to the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security last Monday.
The center found from the medical checkup manual released by the ministry in 2007 that female applicants are required to have a much more complicated examination on their reproductive organs than their male counterparts, which includes exams of their vaginal speculum and recto-vaginal abdomen.
“Such checkups are unnecessary, since they by no means determine whether the candidates can perform well in public service positions,” Yang Zhanqing, head of the center, told the Global Times. “Moreover, it is an indirect discrimination against women applicants, which is also likely to violate their privacy and cause emotional discomfort.”
An unnamed source at the Shanghai Civil Affairs Bureau told the Global Times last week that the examination items were set up by medical examination institutions and the bureau would reject a candidate based on a poor report provided by the hospitals.
Strict as it has already been, Yang said that the governments at provincial and municipal levels are endowed with the right to hold a local standard, which explains the existence of some “absurd and even hilarious” requirements in different parts of the country.
The Hunan Provincial Office of Personnel Civil Service required women candidates to have “symmetrical breasts and normal secondary sexual characteristics” in 2009, which was later dropped due to wide criticism around the country, People’s Daily online reported in June, 2009.
It was followed by a case in South China’s Guangdong Province a year later, dubbed China’s first case of “gender discrimination,” brought up by three failed civil servant candidates against a local human resources department.
The three candidates passed written tests and interviews for public service positions in Foshan in April 2009, but were rejected after they were found to be carriers of Mediterranean Anemia, the Information Times reported.
The court rejected their appeals, saying that patients with blood diseases were ineligible for public service positions under Chinese law, despite the fact that the MCV test was not included in the compulsory items for routine blood tests.
A district government in Southwest China’s Sichuan Province stipulated candidates for law enforcement jobs must be attractive young women between 18 and 23 years old with a good temperament, Xinhua reported in October 2010. The district government defended itself by saying that it was aiming to improve its city image.
Inadequate laws
Chen Yaya, an advocate of gender equality who is working on a UN women project to promote the idea through new media, opposes the gynecological examination for female applicants, referring to it as one of the blatant gender inequalities in China’s job market.
“The individual health information, part of an individual’s privacy, should not be collected by any institution without permission,” she told the Global Times last week.
Such private information, however, is pretty easy to obtain nowadays by government departments and hospitals who provide free gynecological examinations to women in the name of promoting women’s health, said Chen.
“A compulsory examination on men’s and women’s genitals required by the current public service position recruitment system infringes on the privacy of a Chinese citizen,” Wu Yiliang, a lawyer who handles job discrimination cases, told the Global Times last week.
The current law on employment contracts, however, fails to directly point out which criteria should not be used as job requirements, for instance, Mediterranean Anemia gene, he added.
Hepatitis B carriers, who used to be discriminated against in the job market, are now eligible for public service positions as long as the infection doesn’t progress to the disease stage, according to a health standard issued by the government in 2005.
Despite the prohibition, refusing to hire hepatitis B carriers or other disease carriers such as HIV and venereal disease is still an open secret among employers, but they still do it because many other employees do not want infected coworkers.
“But the inadequacy in the laws is still a big obstacle for disadvantaged groups to win job discrimination cases in practice,” said Wu.
By Li Mao in Shanghai
