Equal opportunities barely obeyed in civil service recruitment
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Xinhua, November 22, 2011
The recruitment for national civil service in recent years did not offer equal opportunities to qualified job seekers, a latest law school survey showed.
Not publicly acknowledging any form of discrimination though, many employers of public offices don't hesitate to hide their preferences on age, gender, education and state of health, researchers at the Constitutionalism Research Institute of China University of Political Science and Law said Tuesday.
Official statistics showed that more than 2 million eligible candidates sought for slots within 15,290 job vacancies in national-level public offices in 2011.
Chinese college grads are usually enthusiast about finding jobs within government branches, echoing the old Chinese saying of "the best scholars should be recruited by the government."
It is even more urgent at a time when people are trying to secure a stable future amid a troubled global economy.
The survey scrutinized the 9,762 employment posts, including those from the cabinet departments and state judicial organs, in 2011.
The civil service recruitment restricts eligible candidates to Chinese nationals aged from 18 to 35, which the survey defines as discrimination, citing that "no evidence suggests people aged above 35 cannot be competent enough to become civil servants."
Under a few specified circumstances such as for doctorates in some disciplines, however, the age limit was a bit relaxed and those aged no older than 40 could also sign up for civil service exams.
Meanwhile, vacancies in which successful candidates were allegedly recruited based on gender increased from 1,203 in 2010 to 1,519, accounting for 9.9 percent of the total number in 2011, the survey said.
"These vacancies were mostly for males only, or the job descriptions explicitly announced that males should register for them," the survey said.
Similarly, such employments disqualified either AIDS patients or HIV carriers. Medical experts usually believe that many HIV carriers are basically as competent as healthy people and the virus carriers should not be excluded from the recruitment process, according to the survey.
"Government departments and public institutions at the state level should have zero tolerance for discrimination in employment and take the lead in rooting it out," associate law professor Liu Xiaonan, who co-authored the survey, said.
It is the second time since last year that the law school has attempted to expose discriminatory practices in the civil servant recruitment.
Prof. Liu said the survey would be shared with the State Administration of Civil Service, which is in charge of the country's civil servant recruitment, and hopefully with human resources management of other departments as well.
"I hope that inter-agency work should be done to revise the civil servant recruitment, repeal existing discriminatory clauses, and ensure equal employment opportunities for all," Liu said.
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