AS PART OF THE GOVERNMENT'S EFFORTS to promote gender equality in employment, the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security and eight other ministries, agencies and social groups, issued a notice on Thursday forbidding employers asking female job applicants about their marital and childbearing status. China Daily writer Zhang Zhouxiang comments:

By Saturday evening, the hashtag#Employers forbidden to ask female job applicants about marital or childbearing status# had already been read 310 million times on Sina Weibo, China's equivalent to Twitter, making it one of the hottest topics of the weekend. More than 66,000 bloggers voiced their opinions on the move, with the majority of them expressing their support.

Although the public's attention has fallen on the clause about marital and childbearing status only, actually, the whole document, titled "Notice on further regulating employment activities so as to promote the employment rate of women", contains more content than the one that made the buzz. For example, it vows to strengthen skills training for women, more strictly implement the birth insurance system, as well as make it easier for women to take employers to court if they believe they have been the victims of unfair treatment.

Many employers tend to avoid hiring a woman who is planning to have a baby or already has children. Even though the law forbids any such practices in the job market, employers can get around it by rejecting the applications of prospective mothers and married women on other excuses. There used to be cases of female job applicants suing such employers, but they failed because it was too difficult to collect evidence to prove they had not been treated fairly.

The guiding document this time has hit the point. When employers have no information about the marital or childbearing status of female job applicants, they have no way of selectively rejecting women who plan to have children or married women.

The latest moves seek to address the problem of the lack of specific measures to promote gender equality. But not only do they uphold women's rights, they will also encourage women to have children as they will have greater confidence that they will not face any unfair treatment in the job market or at work for doing so.