With the government having less say in how companies and other employers hire and hand out pink slips, often the first employees to be laid off are women. This grim reality was outlined in a recent 25-page report issued by the All-China Federation of Trade-Unions (ACFTU), describing conditions women face in the workplace.

"Businesses have begun to calculate the costs of laborers, and women are the first to be considered surplus," Liu Ping, the ACFTU's deputy division director on women's rights, told China Daily.

The report was compiled after studying information gathered between 1978 and 2002, after a study was done on the working lives of female workers in Shanghai, Chongqing and provinces such as Liaoning, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Guangdong and Gansu.

It found that as reforms have been implemented in the transition to a market economy, industries such as the textile sector and some other female-dominated areas have sustained large-scale layoffs. Not surprisingly, a disproportionate number of women got the ax.

The number of urban women employed in the surveyed cities in 2002 was about 41.6 million, or 17.3 million less than in 1996.

What's more, just 39 percent of women who lose their jobs become re-employed - 24.9 percentage points less than men who lose their jobs. What naturally occurs is that women - with increasing pressure to find sources of income - choose short-term or temporary jobs, or try self-employment.

That's all well and good.

Women who are destitute may turn to less positive forms of employment, such as prostitution. This bedevils authorities and can cause untold societal problems, from spawning criminal gangs to spreading the scourge of HIV/AIDS and the untold misery and costs it brings.

A large proportion of women who take legitimate temporary jobs earn incomes that fall short of the minimum standards required by government for social security insurance. And in such low-level jobs, women are stuck in a rut with no hope for improving theirs or their children's prospects for advancement or a better life.

And unlike in the planned-economy era, when salaries or wages were often determined by workers' experience, women have been pushed into low-end jobs where time and experience mean nothing. This just reinforces the ever-widening gap between the incomes of men and women.

In fact, from 1990 to 2000, the divide between men's and women's incomes grew 7.4 percentage points, or from 100:77.5 to 100:70.1, the ACFTU report shows. In 2002, there were twice as many women in jobs below the 500 yuan (US$60) monthly income level, with 1.5 times as many men holding 2,000-yuan (US$240) jobs as women.

Gender discrimination is also reflected in management and leadership roles in private businesses and government, with women accounting for just 1.3 percent of management posts in all organizations in 2002. That's utterly ridiculous, given the massive talent pool in China.

Women should demand change, since there's little motivation for market-based firms to change their ways, especially in a system that is only now developing and has much maturing to do. Councilors and political delegates must take a long view and see women as partners in this massive economy. Trade unions should play a more active role in representing women's rights and demand that employers - private and government - do what is right for the future of women, families and the nation's future.

"Enable every woman who can work to take her place on the labor front, under the principle of equal pay for equal work," Chairman Mao Zedong said in 1955. "This should be done as quickly as possible."

No time like the present.

(China Daily July 2, 2004)