The Rise of Gender-Restricted Job Positions in China's Civil Service Exams: Trends and "Justifications"

While explicit gender-restricted job requirements are prohibited in most advanced labor markets, they remain common in many societies that account for a substantial share of the global population. Previous research on gender discrimination in the labor market has mainly focused on the private sector. In this study, we aim to fill this gap by examining the rise of gender-restricted job positions in China’s civil service exams. Since 2000, the Chinese government has introduced an open, standardized examination for entry-level political positions. Specifically, the National Civil Service Examination (NCSE) transformed a previously closed selection process into one that is more inclusive and rule-based. In recent years, taking the civil service exam and joining the public sector has become an increasingly popular choice among Chinese college graduates. However, despite claims of meritocracy in the recruitment process, we have observed a growing number of positions in the NCSE that are restricted to a specific gender over time. Using a dataset containing the universe of job postings from the NCSE between 2005 and 2024, we document that the proportion of gender-restricted job postings has significantly increased, with male-only positions rising more than female-only positions. By comparing the TF-IDF scores (Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency) for terms in the description of jobs across years, we further show that terms describing adverse working conditions, such as overtime work, frequent business trips, remote areas, and economically underdeveloped regions, have generally become more able to distinguish male-only job postings from other jobs. This finding suggests that protecting women from adverse working conditions may be used as a justification for excluding female applicants from an increasing number of entry-level government jobs. Our findings shed new light on women’s disadvantages in the labor market: explicit gender discrimination is justified even in the presence of competitive recruitment exams.