Lookism in the Chinese Job Advertisements

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study was to explore lookism over a wide range of occupations in the Chinese workplace and investigate if the occurrence of lookism in job advertisements was associated to gender type of occupations and other occupation characteristics. Participants (N = 243) estimated the percentage of female job incumbents for each investigated occupation (N = 20). Content analysis was conducted to examine the occurrence of terms related to physical attributes in the job advertisements (N = 2000) across the 20 occupations. We found that Chinese employers explicitly specified what physical attributes are desirable among their potential employees. Lookism is markedly high in female-dominated occupations.

KEYWORDS:

• Lookism
• gender
• recruitment
• job advertisements
• China

Conflicts of interest

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).