Alibaba, Baidu under fire for posting gender discriminatory job advertisements

New Delhi: Chinese tech companies like Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent are under fire for posting gender discriminatory job advertisements.

According to Human Rights Watch, some job postings “use the physical attributes of women—often with photos of the company’s current employees—to attract male applicants”.

These discriminatory hiring practices are linked to a shrinking proportion of women in the labor force, the report found.  

“In recent years China’s biggest technology companies, such as Tencent, Baidu, and Alibaba, have repeatedly published recruitment ads boasting that there are “beautiful girls” or “goddesses” working for the companies,” the New York-based rights watchdog said in a recent report .

The report further said that “Alibaba’s recruitment social media account posted at midnight a series of photos of several young female employees and described them as 'late night benefits',” it said.

Human Rights Watch has analysed 36,000 Chinese job advertisements largely posted since 2013. Chinese laws ban discrimination based on gender, but “enforcement is low and Chinese authorities rarely proactively investigate companies that repeatedly violate relevant laws,” it said said in the report.

A reuters report has quoted that Tencent has apologized for the adverts after the HRW report while Alibaba has vowed to conduct stricter reviews to ensure its job ads followed workplace equality principles. Meanwhile, Baidu has said the postings were isolated instances.