They’re Not Going to Take it

China, a place once synonymous with concubines and bound feet, has for decades prided itself on being a nation that bars all forms of sexual discrimination. That's made the recent headlines especially jarring. Last month, five local officials in southwestern Guizhou were jailed for forcing underage rural girls into the sex trade; the fact that the men were initially charged with "having sex with underage prostitutes" added to the public outrage. Then there was the case of the two schoolgirls accused by police in the southern city of Kunming of working as prostitutes—even after hospital tests proved they were both still virgins. Or the one in May, when Deng Yujiao drew national attention after she was arrested for stabbing to death a local government official who she said had tried to rape her. Plans to charge the 21-year-old waitress with murder provoked a huge outcry in the media and online, leading to a rare government retreat: rather than murder, Deng was convicted of using excessive force in self-defense and then released (on grounds of diminished responsibility).

These incidents have struck a powerful chord among ordinary citizens because of what they reveal about the status of women in China. While Beijing has officially promoted gender equality ever since Chairman Mao proclaimed that women "hold up half the sky," implementation of this ideal has proved patchy. In its early decades, the Chinese Communist Party did make significant improvements in women's lives—-granting them the right to divorce and to work on an equal footing with men, and offering greater educational opportunities than those found in most other developing countries.

Since the beginning of China's great economic opening in the 1980s, however, there's been some serious backsliding. Many Chinese women—especially the wealthy elites—do live the kinds of lives once unimaginable here, enjoying good education, working for multinationals, and owning their own homes. But millions of their sisters, especially among the poor, have yet to see much change. And there's been a resurgence of many of the old attitudes and types of exploitation that the Communist Party sought to stamp out.

Perhaps the starkest example is the boom in the sex trade. The government abolished prostitution in the 1950s and worked to rehabilitate former escorts—one of its proudest accomplishments. Yet today, massage parlors, hair salons, and other venues offering sex for money have become ubiquitous, and some estimates put the number of prostitutes in China at 4 million.

Such growth reveals how China's market economy has in some ways contributed to the exploitation of women, even as it has created new opportunities for others. Since the 1980s, rural women have enjoyed the freedom to move to urban areas to seek work. But that has produced a large urban underclass, who often find they have no way to make money but to sell themselves—a dilemma likely to grow more common today thanks to the global economic crisis.

The problems go far beyond prostitution. According to Sun Zhongxin, a sociologist specializing in Chinese women's studies at Tufts, capitalism has created a tendency "to treat women as a commodity" throughout China's poorly regulated labor market. "For example, lots of job advertisements now say, 'Seeking a woman, with good features, over 1.6 meters tall.' If you're a woman but you're not pretty, companies may not [hire] you."

Reports of on-the-job discrimination have become commonplace. In a society where state-run enterprises and work units once provided free day care to ensure that mothers could keep working, resistance to hiring women of childbearing age has become widespread. Prof. Jiang Jin, a specialist in women's history at Shanghai's East China Normal University (ECNU), says, "It's harder for women graduates to find jobs than male graduates because of the childbirth issue. Personal quality still matters, but the less-competitive females will face more difficulties." The situation is particularly bad, Jiang says, at the millions of small private businesses. In China's civil service and its remaining large state enterprises, according to Jiang, socialist-era egalitarian attitudes are stronger. But at small outfits, bosses are often "not that well educated about gender equality," she says. And even government workers are not immune. Feng Dongyan, a young Shanghai office worker, recalls applying for a job in a state-run bank and being told by a staff member that "they applied looser standards to male applicants. So out of 100 posts they appointed 80 men," she says.

While there are some signs of progress—50 percent of university or college students in China today are women, up from 23 percent in 1980—the gaps are still huge. The nation's leading headhunter, Chinahr.com, reported in 2007 that the average salary for white-collar men was 44,000 yuan ($6,441), compared with 28,700 yuan ($4,201) for women. Even some women who have done well in business complain that a glass ceiling limits their chances of promotion. A recent Grant Thornton survey found that only 30 percent of senior managers in China's private enterprises are female.