Weight and Gender Discrimination in the Chinese Labor Market

Abstract

At present, most literature nowadays studies weight discrimination in Western countries, but very few of them target China; however, China now has the most obese people in the world. With the focus on weight discrimination in the workplace, this paper will conduct a field experiment focused on whether weight discrimination exists in the context of the Chinese labor market and whether gender discrimination still exists among the overweight and obese population. In the experiment, spurious resumes were sent to real Chinese companies. These resumes are all similar, except for their photos, which can reveal their weight, and biological gender. By comparing the callback rate of all the applicants, we find that weight discrimination does exist in the Chinese labor market, and that women are discriminated against more than men. Then we analyzed the test results according to the national conditions of China.