Looking Into the Hiring Bias — Is Fertility Desire an Important Cause of Gender Discrimination in Chinese Labor Market?

Hiring bias has always been a popular topic. Especially in recent years, it has aroused great concerns from all walks of the society as the development of economy and culture. It is undeniable that women still somewhat suffer from discrimination in the employment. In China, some of the younger generation even choose to voluntarily state that they have no plans to have children in the next few years to ensure that they can avoid hiring discrimination as much as possible and thus get hired. From this phenomenon, we generate the idea to design an experiment to explore the influencing factors in hiring bias under the context of Chinese labour market. In this work, we develop a preliminary hypothesis that becoming pregnant and taking maternity leave is a significant factor of hiring bias, and try to use filed study to conduct the experiment. Basically, we propose to send resumes to real job openings of entry-level positions in real estate industry during the season of campus recruiting and measure the call-back rates. This work is a 2 × 2 design with male and female resumes and either with or without an additional statement saying that the applicant does not plan to have children. The predicted result is that male has a higher call-back rate than female in general, while call-back rate of female-with-statement is higher than female-without-statement, which is the same in male group. But the difference between call-back rates of with-statement and without-statement is lower than female’s. As a conclusion, gender discrimination exists during the hiring process while becoming pregnant and taking maternity leave is a significant factor. And potential gender bias does exist in employment which has already turned into discrimination against women and fertility. Through this study, we expect to gain a deeper understanding of hiring bias and find out the significant influencing factor, so that we can better improve the current situation of gender discrimination in Chinese labor market.