Women at China’s top tech firms say sexism has been hidden from view

Qilai Shen | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Pedestrians ride an escalator near the Jin Mao Tower, center left, and the Shanghai Tower, center right, in the Lujiazui Financial District in Shanghai, China.

Ms Li has a day job in the marketing department of one of China’s biggest tech firms. At night, she has a second career, livestreaming herself eating noodles or telling jokes in return for small donations from thousands of online viewers.

Li, 28, says she is one of at least five women in her office who moonlight to bolster their incomes. She says this is because she and her female peers are paid less than male colleagues and are often overlooked for promotion.

The late nights livestreaming on the YY.com social media platform are worth it, Li says, even though she has been reprimanded twice by her firm for moonlighting.

“The first time I was punished I was scared for my job, but I don’t worry too much now,” Li said. She asked that her first name and the name of her employer not be used.

“It’s not such a risk to work on the side if you know you’re not going anywhere.”

In recent years, China’s tech industry has boomed, with champions like the e-commerce titan Alibaba and Tencent , the social media-to-gaming leader, making waves on the global stage.

But Li’s account of unequal pay at her company, which Reuters was unable to verify independently, underscores how women are often sidelined in that boom.

Reuters spoke to more than a dozen women — and some men — in the sector, from entry-level employees to executives, who described an industry where female engineers and coders battle against ingrained biases favoring men.

“The traditional view is simply to think that women aren’t suitable to be programmers,” said Chen Bin, a former Microsoft engineer and the Beijing-based founder of Teach Girls Coding, a campaign to get more women into the sector.

“Things are better now than ten years ago, but overall the number of women getting into tech is really small,” he said.

China is not the only country where the tech industry has faced heat over a lack of diversity in the workplace. But unlike U.S. peers that have faced legal action over discrimination, including Uber, Alphabet’s Google and Microsoft, Chinese technology companies are relatively opaque about gender issues.

Most give little data on hiring and none of the industry leaders share the diversity reports that are now customary in the United States, shedding doubt on whether women in Chinese firms hold a comparable number of technical or leadership roles.