2.jpg (29.67 KB)
2011-8-9 09:22
Finding a good life-partner is as hard as finding a good job. And the same barriers can come up when looking for both.
I have been trying hard to find a girlfriend for a friend who I've known for several years. He is straight, smart, good-looking and reliable. He runs his own business, with a decent car and apartment in Beijing. He's a family guy. While I'm happily listing the good things about him, I can see the excitement sparkling in the eyes of the girl I'm talking to, until I mention his job as a hair stylist. The sparkle disappears immediately.
The other day, I talked with an experienced headhunter about my resume. She sounded quite difficult on the other end of the phone. "Your experience is mainly in journalism, and your resume didn't show any experience working for a company. It would be very hard if you want to work in-house, even as a PR representative."
"But journalism makes me a fast learner and excellent communicator, and I'm familiar with the industry. Those are the qualities the job needs, and I've got great potential." I said. But she still insisted that my experience was irrelevant to the job.
At the end, she asked, "Are you married?"
"Yes."
"Do you have kids?"
"No."
"Then that will be more difficult for you."
My stylist friend and I are searching for different things, but we are in the same boat for the same reason. People only pay attention to the labels stamped on our foreheads, and ignore the people underneath. And they easily accept the stereotypes that come with these tags.
With this logic, it's not hard to understand that doctors and teachers are among the most popular marriage targets, since getting treatment at a good hospital or your kid into a good school is getting tougher. It also explains why a good looking girl I know got turned down eight times on blind dates as soon as the gentlemen found that she worked as a secretary for a male boss. They immediately assumed she must also be her boss' mistress.
What are other taboo jobs? A post on a popular online forum listed some. Women working as actresses, sales representatives, translators, and successful managers in the private sector are all classified as being dangerous, because they are either more likely to have affairs with powerful men or themselves are too powerful to control. And men working as stylists, drivers, gynecologists, or basketball or soccer players, are classified as bad marriage picks.
When we move from marriage market to job market, we see the same list. We don't hire people from Henan Province, long looked down upon by other Chinese; we hire people younger than 28-year-old with master's degrees or younger than 35-year-old with doctoral degrees, and we hire good-looking women taller than 160 cm. For court clerks, we prefer unmarried women or married ones without immediate plans to have babies.
What will be the results of all these stereotypes?
The number of left-over men and women will keep on climbing, since the easy dismissal of people based on their job title has caused so many prospects to be tossed aside. The divorce rate keeps rising, since a beautiful job title is a poor basis for a long-term relationship. Women in their 30s and men in their 40s can't find good jobs, because they are too old and their life experience and potential are not written on their resume.
In the end, everybody loses from our lazy stereotypes.
Global Times
