Recently, married women who have not given birth to a child face a lot of difficulties in finding a job in Shanghai. Employers are reluctant to hire them, afraid that they might get pregnant and the pregnancy might lower their working efficiency. This is obviously a kind of job discrimination that is not allowed according to the newly drafted Job Promotion Law. Although the new law clearly forbids this, married women might still find it difficult to use such law to protect their legal rights in reality, because the authorities might find it rather difficult to implement the law at present, the Labour News reported.

"Because we do not have a child, my wife has been turned down three times now already," said Mr. Wang indignantly. His wife, Xiao Wen, is a college graduate majoring in commercial English. Last year, she quitted her former job. At that time, she thought that it might be easy for her to find a new job since she was still young, had a good major and had already gained some work experiences. She hadn't expected that she would be refused in the job market only because she hadn't had any child.

Xiao Wen was not the only one to have encountered this problem. During the interviews, this reporter found that many young married women without children had the same experience as Xiao Wen.

Shen Yue'e works in an employment agency at Shanghai Zhabei District Trade Union Federation. Shen said of all the employers she had known so far, 60% clearly stated in their recruitments they would either hire unmarried women or women who already had a child. Except for professionals, they wouldn't consider hiring a married woman without a child.

In order to find a job easily, many married women who did not have children said they already had children when filling the registration form. Some employers, in order to prevent their female employees to give birth at the same time, even stated in the contract that women should not give birth to a child within a year after they joined the company, while other companies will set the birth quota in a year. Women who don't have a child are often discriminated against in the job market at present, some industrial analysts say.