Recruiters more likely to view resumes from male job seekers, report finds

Jia Zhenlong, a partner at CGL, an international executive search firm based in Shanghai, said women in senior managerial roles account for approximately half of their client employers.

"Women don't present any difference from men in stress tolerance, resilience and time commitment from our observations," he said.

Xu Yili, a Shanghai-based human resources consultant for enterprises and industries with 25 years of experience, said social change has opened up more workplace opportunities for women.

For example, he said, sales in many industries three decades ago were mainly about client entertainment, which called more for male social attributes.

"Today, sales are more about making competitive promotion plans and contract items, which requires more of an employee's good education background and data analysis capability," Xu said. "Such requirements have little to do with gender."

To avoid unconscious gender bias, more recruiters using social networking sites to find potential candidates are blocking gender details and pictures when viewing people's resumes, Zhang said.

"The function helps them focus more on the core competitiveness of the candidate and how they will fit the position rather than their gender or if they're good-looking," she said.

Recruiters were also becoming more careful with the wording in job descriptions, Zhang said.

"Today in China, roughly 70 percent of recruiters examine and verify that wording with biased implications doesn't appear in their recruitment notices, and 28 percent of recruiters have taken gender diversity into consideration when drafting such notices," she said.