What is employment discrimination?

Talking about the past year of 2022, Wang Le, a product manager of an Internet finance company in Beijing, called it "difficult": at that time, he wanted to find a new job and hit a wall one after another.

"Some companies only require hard conditions such as relevant work experience on the surface, but secretly screen employees according to factors such as gender."

Wang Le said that because she was a woman and was ready to get married and have children, she was rejected by four companies, and she didn't find a job far from her ideal goal until the end of the year.

What happened in Wang Le is not an isolated case. Experts in related fields said that enterprises used discriminatory rules in recruitment to shut out job seekers, which violated relevant laws and regulations on labor security.

Employment discrimination involves many aspects.

In April this year, an enterprise in Jiangsu province refused to recruit "people with tattoos in the three eastern provinces" on the grounds of government regulations, which became the focus of society. According to the local authorities, there is no rule that the government does not recruit people from the three northeastern provinces, and it is told that "if there is employment discrimination, workers can file a lawsuit".

Employment discrimination means that employers set various restrictive clauses for job seekers without legal basis. The geographical discrimination of not recruiting people from the three northeastern provinces is not the only manifestation of employment discrimination. Employment discrimination may occur in education, gender, even face value, constellation, eating habits and so on. Among them, gender discrimination is the most serious.

"Looking for a job now, it is not enough to prepare a resume, but also to prepare the interviewer's tricky questions."

Wang Le said that women over the age of 30 who have no children often encounter "Will they get married at work and have plans to have children?" When recruiting middle managers with three years or more work experience, many companies don't know it, but secretly give priority to men, because men "don't have to think too much about family and children, and can withstand high-intensity work."

"If one day, women don't have to be asked' How are you going to balance work and family', gender discrimination will really be eliminated."

Wang Le said.

It is worth noting that age discrimination in employment is becoming more and more serious.

Huang Qing, who works in an electronic agriculture company in Shenzhen, said that age discrimination has become a common problem in the recruitment process of enterprises. Born in 1987, he will turn 34 this year. In the process of looking for a job, he found that some enterprises were embarrassed to sign labor contracts with him for several years.

"In Internet companies, 35 years old is a hurdle."

Huang Qing said that in many enterprises, 35 years old is the dividing line for people in the workplace to accept high-intensity work pressure and performance requirements. "If you can't become a senior practitioner or switch to management before the age of 35, it will be extremely difficult to change jobs." Huang Qing explained the "35-year-old threshold" circulating on the Internet.

In addition, academic discrimination is also a common phenomenon of employment discrimination.

HR Zhang Xinxin, a pharmaceutical company, said that employers pay more attention to the issues of employment cost and employment efficiency when recruiting. Relatively speaking, highly educated male workers seem to make enterprises pay less, so they become the first choice for employers. "But these employers often can't use a dynamic vision to evaluate the comprehensive quality of workers. This has become a social prejudice, job seekers can't get a fair stage, employers will suffer because they can't choose the right talents, and it will also cause waste of human resources. " Zhang Xin said.