ABSTRACT
Major technology companies, which modelled themselves partly on international comparisons, including Alibaba and Tencent, were more forward looking and vowed to guarantee gender equality in their recruitment processes. For a woman, marriage meant leaving the family home and moving into a new household with her husband. Indeed, the normal Chinese word for marriage when applied to a woman is chujia, ‘to leave the family’. The most significant piece of legislation directed towards the condition of women in the early years of the People’s Republic of China was the Marriage Reform Law of 1950. The dissolution of the communes had liberated women from agricultural work, but alternatives were not always available. More revealing were the ‘three obediences’ which defined the relationships of women with the men in their families at different stages of their lives: it was, of course, assumed that they would not have any association with men outside their families.
