Experts forecast increased employment discrimination against women
A family planning official said that China's adoption of a two-child policy will help boost the country's economic growth rate by about 0.5 percent by increasing the size of the labor force and stimulating consumption, while experts worry that the new policy will aggravate employment discrimination against women.
Wang Pei'an, deputy head of the National Health and Family Planning Commission (NHFPC), said at a news conference on Tuesday that after the implementation of the two-child policy, China's labor force could increase by more than 30 million by 2050, according to news portal .
"In the short term, the two-child policy will stimulate consumption in fields including housing, education and healthcare … In the long run, the policy will have significant influence on economic growth," Wang said.
The forecast came nearly two weeks after China's government announced that it will allow all couples to have two children, abandoning its decades-long one-child policy.
Wang claimed that most couples now want to have two children, citing an NHFPC survey that found that the ideal number of children for couples aged 20 to 44 is 1.93.
Despite the policy's contribution to economic growth, Chen Zuxin, a specialist who now runs a human resources training camp, told the Global Times that the new policy will aggravate employment discrimination against women. "Many companies will determine that because women may take maternity leave twice and the company will have to find a substitute for them during these periods, the company's operation costs will increase. Therefore, they will prefer to hire men instead of women."
In the city of Ningbo in East China's Zhejiang Province, a woman surnamed Sun was forced to quit in March because she became pregnant with a second baby. The company claimed that Sun had signed a contract stating that she could not give birth to a child during her tenure there, the Xinhua News Agency reported.
According to Chinese law, employers should not use a female employee's pregnancy, childbirth or lactation to cut her pay, fire her or terminate her labor contract. However, a survey of female university graduates conducted by the China Democratic League found that childbirth is the biggest obstacle preventing women from finding jobs, Xinhua reported in March.
Chen said that to address the problem, employers must change their mindset. "Women who have two children are more stable and will not frequently switch jobs and workplaces, which is good for the company in the long term," he said.
Guo Jing - a Zhejiang-based feminist with Gender Equality Working Group, an NGO dedicated to promoting gender equality - told the Global Times that the group is concerned about employment discrimination after the adoption of the two-child policy. She said the group will cooperate with experts to devise a detailed plan to help women and will present it to government for reference.
