Chinese law has protected women’s rights since 1950 when the revolutionary Marriage Law outlawed such feudal practices as concubinage and forced marriage. The communist party in China has always been a proponent of equality for women. Yet, despite the laws on the books, China remains in many ways a difficult place to be a woman, and there are few places where this is this more evident than in the workplace, where women struggle to be taken seriously and often find themselves pressured into providing more services than those originally outlined in the contract.

Workplace sexual harassment was only outlawed in China in 2005, and the law was left vague, with individual courts left to interpret for themselves the definition of sexual harassment. However, despite the fact that few sexual harassment cases are prosecuted in China, as many as four out of five Chinese women have experienced some form of harassment in the workplace. The harassment can be blatant, or it can be subtle, and female expat workers are not immune to the sexual politics at play in Chinese workplaces.

One common scenario is female office workers, foreign as well as Chinese, being expected to put in long nights drinking with customers and clients. While the late night KTV or drinking party is a part of the masculine workplace culture as well, there is an added layer to this when female employees are expected to get drunk with male clients. Female employees are often chosen for these sorts of “assignments” based on their good looks and their willingness to put up with the client’s drunken shenanigans. While some Chinese women seem to possess the cultural knowledge to navigate these sorts of situations, foreign women who find themselves playing hostess to a drunken client can become uncomfortable. “There are certain expectations,” said one foreign employee, a marketing representative for a factory in Guangdong. “If you don’t drink, or aren’t willing to flirt with the clients, you’re seen as being a spoilsport. No one says you have to sleep with them, but you can’t reject them outright either. It can be very uncomfortable.”
Workplace sexual harassment may be a blatant violation of boundaries (one prominent businesswoman recalls how, early in her career, every time her boss caught her alone he would come up behind her and start kissing her neck and licking her ear), but the type of harassment a foreign woman working at a Chinese office is likely to encounter may be more subtle, as there is still a certain fear of crossing certain lines with foreigners. Western woman in a Chinese office may have to fend off rumors of their sexual prowess, since a common stereotype of foreign women is that they have voracious sexual appetites and are “loose” moraled, ready to hop in bed with anyone. There may be co-workers who are interested in testing this theory by making inappropriate advances, or, after a night out drinking, are unwilling to take no for an answer, assuming that a Western female must be “up for it.”

However, most female workers in Chinese offices will probably not have direct encounters with sexual harassment; instead, they’ll bear witness to the sexual politics of the Chinese office. Watching young Chinese women get passed over for jobs because they’re not good looking enough or seeing the young woman with a steady boyfriend at a disadvantage over the single woman who is willing to go drinking, or perhaps even more, with the boss, can be demoralizing. While sexual harassment exists in the West (obviously, as the term was coined there), in these days of lawsuits and political correctness most Western women understand that there are boundaries as to what behavior is appropriate and what isn’t. They know that there are options. However, for a young Chinese woman who is having an affair with the boss, the options may be slim. If she breaks it off, she may lose her job. If she tries to take the case to HR, she may find that HR is more concerned with keeping the boss as an ally than with righting any workplace wrongs. Furthermore, the Chinese concept of face plays into these sexual scenarios as well. If the boss makes advances towards a young woman and she rejects them, she has caused him to lose face and while he may not fire her, she may find herself passed over for plumb assignments, consistently the low woman on the totem pole. What a foreign employee in a Chinese office may find most disturbing is the widespread acceptance of sexual harassment and of the trading of sexual favors for workplace advancement. Women, foreign and Chinese alike, may feel uncomfortable about the pervasiveness of these attitudes, but foreign women are probably used to a society which provides a certain level of recourse.

However, that recourse may be on the way. As recently as June 2010, Guangdong took a pioneering stance towards the issue of sexual harassment in the Chinese workplace, passing a law which not only reinforces the 2005 law which made sexual harassment illegal, but also outlines specifically what sexual harassment means stating “Sexual harassment of women through language, words, physical contacts, graphics or electronic information is forbidden.” In addition, the law makes rules for employers, outlining the procedure which should be followed should sexual harassment be reported. While this new law still leaves a lot up for interpretation and how these cases are handled in the courts remains to be seen, the fact that a large and prosperous province such as Guangdong sees the needs for additional laws and protections against workplace sexual harassment means that, some experts say, strengthening of the national law is certainly soon to follow.

Related links:
Survey: 30% of Chinese Men Have Been Sexually Harassed
Chinese Feminism? No Thank you!
Survey Probes Chinese Attitudes Towards Women’s Rights

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