The Question Is Illegal in One Office and Routine in the Other

🇬🇧 UK · 🇨🇳 China

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

In the UK, the gender pay gap for full-time employees stood at 6.9 percent in April 2025, a figure that has been slowly, unglamorously shrinking for over a decade. In China, a survey by recruitment platform Zhaopin found that 61.1 percent of women were asked about marriage and childbearing plans during job interviews, against roughly a third of men — and one recent graduate reported that three of the five companies she interviewed with told her outright they wouldn't hire her if she planned to have children. Both countries have laws against exactly this kind of discrimination. Only one of them has made asking about it socially unacceptable.

Do's & Don'ts

🇬🇧 UK

🇨🇳 China

UK

The UK's gender workplace gap has narrowed steadily rather than dramatically — the pay gap for full-time employees fell from 7.1 percent to 6.9 percent between 2024 and 2025, continuing a decade-long trend that has cut the gap by more than a quarter. Representation tells a more uneven story depending on where you look: women hold nearly 45 percent of FTSE 100 boardroom seats but only 9.4 percent of FTSE 100 CEO roles, a gap that suggests the pipeline to influence and the pipeline to ultimate authority are still two very different pipelines.

What's changed most is what's now legally unsayable. Asking a candidate about marriage or childbearing plans in a UK interview is unlawful discrimination, full stop, and most employers have internalized that far enough that it rarely happens outright. The remaining friction shows up later and more subtly — South Bank University research found roughly half of women believe maternity leave harmed their professional trajectory, and over a third report being sidelined or demoted during pregnancy, leave, or shortly after returning. The discrimination didn't disappear; it moved from the interview room to the performance review.

China

China's picture is shaped by a workforce with genuinely high female labor participation — 339 million working women, by the Chinese Academy of Labor and Social Security's count — sitting alongside interview and promotion practices that remain openly, legally questionable in ways the UK largely eliminated from formal process decades ago. Human Rights Watch has documented workplace discrimination intensifying under the two-child policy era specifically, as employers grew more wary of hiring or promoting women perceived as likely to take extended leave, sometimes more than once.

The mechanism is structural as much as attitudinal: a 2019 study found 57 percent of professional women believed being at "the life stage of marriage and childbearing" was itself treated as a legitimate reason to be passed over for promotion, and job postings specifying a preference for male candidates, or for women who have already had children, remain common enough to be a recognized category of complaint rather than an outlier. Chinese unions have recently begun formally telling employers to stop asking about marital status in interviews — itself a tacit admission of how normalized the practice still is.

The Reckoning

The UK and China have arrived at nearly opposite failure points on the same underlying problem. The UK has largely closed the loop on overt discrimination — the illegal question isn't asked — but a subtler, harder-to-litigate bias persists in who gets promoted and protected once someone actually becomes a parent. China has the opposite shape: the bias is upfront, documented, and often stated outright in the interview itself, which is uncomfortable but at least legible — you know where you stand from day one, even if where you stand is unfair.

That legibility cuts both ways for someone relocating. A British woman moving to a Chinese office may be startled by direct questions that would be illegal at home, but may also find, paradoxically, that she knows exactly what she's dealing with rather than discovering it slowly through subtler post-leave demotions. A Chinese woman moving to a UK office may find the formal protections reassuring, only to encounter the same maternity-related career penalty her UK colleagues quietly describe, just relocated to a stage of the process the law doesn't reach.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Quora — A recent graduate answering a question about job discrimination in China described being asked in nearly every interview whether she had a boyfriend and when she planned to marry, and said one interviewer told her directly the role would be difficult to offer if she intended to have children within a few years.

r/AskUK — A woman recounted returning from maternity leave to find her client portfolio had been quietly redistributed among colleagues "to keep things moving," a change nobody had framed as a demotion but that she said functioned as exactly that.

TeamBlind — A foreign employee at a China-based tech firm noted that female colleagues who were promoted tended to be visibly older or already had children, describing an unspoken sense that being at "the wrong life stage" was treated internally as a genuine risk factor for the company.

Internations Shanghai — A British expat manager wrote that she was taken aback by how routinely her Chinese HR counterparts asked candidates about marriage plans, until a local colleague explained that most female candidates expected the question and had learned to answer it strategically rather than being blindsided by it.

r/expats — A Chinese professional who'd moved to a UK company said the biggest surprise wasn't the absence of discrimination, which she'd expected, but how differently it showed up — subtler, slower, and harder to point to directly than what she'd navigated at home.

Conclusion

If you're a woman moving to the UK, know that the formal protections are real and worth using, but keep an eye on what happens to your role and trajectory specifically around parental leave, where the data suggests the actual risk still concentrates. If you're moving to China, go in informed rather than blindsided — research the specific employer's track record, because the discrimination there is more likely to be upfront and, in its own uncomfortable way, more visible from the start. The honest version, over a drink: Britain has mostly hidden the bias somewhere later in the process, and China hasn't hidden it much at all — neither is a reason to celebrate, but knowing which one you're walking into changes how you prepare.