I have recently been given a car from my dad to drive around. It is a car 10 years old and it has done 150k miles/240k kilometers but still in surprisingly good condition thanks to my dad having done good maintenance on it.

But as I drive around, I can’t help but notice how other cars on the road react to me. I felt like I was being bullied while I drive, cars would cut me without warning, beep me for seemingly no reason, all while I have been driving perfectly in my lane, following the speed limits and using my indicators properly. I have my full license already so I do not have the ‘probationary period’ badge on my car. All of these can be explained by the simple fact that I am in China, a country not exactly known for having good drivers, the reasons of which this article tries to identify (Note: it has nothing to do with race or culture).

Or it could be I am a female driver.

Female drivers are usually seen as worse drivers, globally. A simple search on Google confirms this bias (Google is blocked in China so I am using an anti-censorship software to bypass the block). At least 60% more results show up when the gender is swapped in the search term.

Sexism against females are rampant in China. In the case of female drivers, the sexism is displayed in plain daylight. Beijing Police (capital of China) once published a post titled “Female drivers, please pay attention and avoid driving mistakes” which the BBC reported on.

“Some female drivers lack a sense of direction and are often hesitant as to which roads to take.”

“This is particularly so when [they] drive on roads such as elevated bridges. They often can’t find the entrance or the exit. They can’t remember how to find places which they have been to several times.”

The post has been criticized as sexist, but this is far from the only display of sexism towards female drivers in China. The Straight Times (newspaper based in Singapore) reported on ‘female only parking spaces’ marked with stiletto on pink background and happens to be larger than other parking spaces because ‘haha female drivers bad’. Many Chinese social media users also railed against female drivers after bus plunges into the river, which was caused by a collision with a car, driven by a woman. SCMP (newspaper based in Hong Kong) reported on the sexism that surfaced after this incident, including comments on Chinese social media such as ‘The traffic management authorities should just ban women from driving’.

In Shenzhen, ‘Priority carriages for women’ is available on all lines of subway. It claims to help women avoid being harassed by males on the subway, but this is not a solution for sexual harassment and instead a move that can potentially turn into victim blaming because ‘you should have stayed in your carriages or expect to be harassed’, similar to how people blame rape victims for wearing the clothes they wore at the time instead of the person actually at fault, the rapist.

Job advertisements frequently displays sexism according to a SCMP article, ‘Looking for a pretty female, must be taller than 1.70 meters, with fine features’, these type of job advertisements are considered illegal according to Chinese law but the authorities are not bothered to actually enforce it. In some areas of the country, women are not even allowed to eat on the main dining table, not to mention the countless girls that are not even allowed to ever live, because the parents chose to abort them as soon as they found out they will be having a daughter instead of a son. The practice of finding out the sex of the baby before birth is strictly prohibited by law in order to prevent sex-selective abortions, but just as in job advertisements, this is often unenforced. This practice of female infanticide is exposed by documentary films such as It’s a Girl: The Three Deadliest Words in the World.

As I was growing up, I constantly heard remarks like ‘Girls perform better than boys before the third grade (in primary school) only, they lack the energy to keep them going far’, and as I aged that magical time when girls will suddenly not have the energy to keep going gets replaced for no apparent reason, once it was ‘after primary school’, then it became ‘after middle school’, and then ‘in high school’, ‘in college’, ‘in jobs’…

I went a couple weeks ago to a computer repair store to fix my MacBook, I heard the remark of ‘Girls are better than boys nowadays, many boys won’t even be able to dismantle this computer to find out where the problem is and girls like you can do it’, as I explained to the shop technician what I thought the problem was. His words recognized my worth, but that is still troublesome because my worth was recognized based on being myself, but established by my comparison to the benchmark, a man.

I wish for a day that I would no longer hear those words.

I wish for a day when my first action when I get into the car is not locking the door immediately before even putting down my bag, for my own safety, something my mom taught me and something my dad never had to worry about.

I wish for a day when menstruation is not a taboo topic.

I wish for a day when people are no longer discriminated or stereotyped against because of their gender.

I wish for a day when I can say I am female without others perceiving me as a less-than-whole person in this country.

But until that day comes, many Chinese women’s wish list includes ‘not being born female’, which is something I have even heard from the person who gave me birth.

P.S. I started writing this after being sick of sexism I see and experience in China as female, and the last straw was Zhihu (Chinese equivalent of Quora, which is blocked) sent me a notification, recommending me to read a sexist answer to the question ‘Why do people say women are bad drivers’, answers to which is basically entirely sexist, one-sided and extremely biased view. I know this an incomplete experience of being female in China, or experienced by Chinese women, I can only write so much at this point in time and I only have what I know and have experienced as reference, but I might come back to this topic in the future.

As the world exits the COVID-19 pandemic, more and more companies are pushing for workers to “Return to Office”. Many are also expecting full-time in-person work and dismisses remote work (or Work From Home, a problematic term that I will expand upon later) as “not real work”. There have even been instances where companies that once promised remote work will be implemented permanently turning its back on workers that have structured their life accordingly and forcing them to come back to the office instead. This is done even in companies that according to their own statistics that remote work is more productive.

Opponents of remote work often use the term “WFH”, or Work from Home to describe remote work, and it is often described as a perk. They often believe that working from the office is the only way to do real work.

This is a clear case of the Principal-Agent problem. The managers of the company are supposed to be working for the benefits of the shareholders and maximizing the profit potential. Instead, managers fall to their personal crave for the sense of control. I know someone that manages his team from Toronto that he forces to go into the New York office everyday. After all, how can they know you are doing real work unless they get to force you to commute 2 hours each way? Knowing that someone was forced to lose sleep, gain anxiety, be more stressed, is simply an irreplaceable joy that remote work can never offer. #slam_dunk_argument

Even if we ignore the Principal-Agent problem and pretend there is no personal motivation for the managers making such a decision, and it was purely made for the benefits of the business, it makes no sense.

Companies usually pay their workers something called a salary, along with possibility other perks. All of these compensation have a singular purpose, make the employee happy enough to keep doing the job. If a company can pay someone $5k a month to do the job, chances are they won’t find someone at $10k a month if they deliver the same quality of products. It is the same theme as the Murphy’s law of combat, “Remember, your weapons are made by the lowest bidder”. Considering this, allowing workers more freedom in deciding where they want to live would be an obvious way of improving their happiness. A happier worker = A more productive worker, so a manager who is forcing their team to go into a shoebox office is engaged in active sabotage against the company interest.

The auto plants of Detroit shutdown because of cheaper costs of producing in Japan. Outsourcing labor is just one of the many ways of remote work, but somehow with the advent of new technology that allows for a programmer to code from anywhere in the world, they are somehow not doing “real work” unless they go to a desk that has the same Wi-Fi connection as any other Starbucks?

As a woman, the traditional office environment can often be actively hostile. From the increased potential of physical sexual assault due literally being in the same physical location, to the air-con temperature that is often too cold for women’s comfort, it is simply a space that is not friendly, and therefore reduces the productivity. Many woman are also expected to bear household chores, and there are way more stay-at-home moms compared to dads. The inability to participate in the working world from your kitchen counter has been a huge career barrier for many women.

The gender pay gap exists for a reason, prejudice. However, I argue the solution is simple, let capitalism take over. If a woman’s work quality is the same as their male counterpart, fire the guy and hire another woman. Gender pay gap exists? Good! Exploit it!

Societal attitudes towards work changes depending on the era. When computer programming first started, newspapers pushed that women are more suited to do the job, then thought as mere clerical work, because women are more “careful”. It was only after men realized the job was important that the prejudice against female coders started and programming became a male dominated domain. This shows that societal attitudes towards work and its relationship with gender has nothing to do with objective reality.

Different societies also have different attitudes towards work. In this video, the Japanese salaried worker spends most of his days travelling across Tokyo to meet with clients face to face to resolve matters that can often be done on the phone, because Japanese culture believes face-to-face meetings to be more “polite”. He also arrived at the office 40 mins before the official start time and had work even after arriving at home after 8 pm. Japan is not known for creating the biggest startups, perhaps for a reason. After all, how much brain space do you really have for creativity after such a long day?

Japanese work culture is also known to be very prejudiced against women, who often have no real path towards career success and are often expected to marry, baby, and quit. How far can an economy go that ignores half of its highly educated population?

By not opening jobs that can done remotely to remote workers, a company ignores the entire global population, apart from wherever they happen to have an office at. Remote work is not “Work from Home”, which usually leads to the logical fallacy of “You are at home for the entire day, therefore you are not working, therefore WFH is not working, therefore remote work does not work”. Remote work is just work in a different environment, one that can be adjusted to fit the individual needs much better than a standardized office environment, one that boosts productivity, and eventually revenue.

Ignoring women means ignoring 50% of the potential talent pool, mandating in-person work means ignoring 99.99% of the potential talent pool. Remote work is simply, work. An employee of any gender is simply, an employee.

Soviet Union is dead, but capitalism has been defeated.

All hail prejudice.