Gender discrimination at work is illegal in the United States–but occupational gender segregation persists nonetheless. Though social arrangements of gender have changed significantly over the years and are in persistent flux, gender norms remain pervasive in many aspects of modern society. But in a country that has outlawed outright discrimination in hiring, how do job recruitment advertisements perpetuate gendered segregation?
In a recent paper published in Social Problems, I explore how online job platforms geared towards Chinese immigrants enforce occupational segregation for the restaurant and nail salon industries. Through a qualitative analysis of the 168worker platform, I find that employers maintain gender homogeneity in male-dominated restaurant kitchens and female-dominated nail salons through explicit discrimination, while also broadcasting gender norms that reproduce traditional enactments of masculinity and femininity on the job.
Research on Chinese immigrants’ participation in the labor market often focuses on the ethnic economy, or economic niches where there is a high concentration of co-ethnics. Historically, informal networks based on kinship or shared hometowns in China have played an important role for Chinese immigrants in exchanging information and finding employment. However, as the population increases, there are a growing number of Chinese immigrants from a much wider range of geographical localities, with distinctive dialects and cultures, all but dissolving the regional ties that characterized longstanding immigrant communities. Historically these groups hailed largely from China’s southeast coast. Given their regional ties and shared culture, they easily consolidated and mobilized personal networks once in the U.S. More recently, rising costs and intense competition found in gateway cities like New York force many Chinese-immigrant owned businesses, especially restaurants, to search for markets in small towns and suburbs. As immigrant business fan out across the country, online platforms have emerged as important sites for prospective immigrant workers to find jobs. In the process, a “digital enclave” has replaced a real one.
As the hiring process moves online, so do practices of discrimination that characterized in-person, network-embedded employment. Digital job advertisements are often strongly reminiscent of word-of-mouth descriptions, with rich descriptions of working environments and workplace relationships. One such advertisement announces a “nail parlor hiring young female assistant nail technician with good English”. In a practice long made illegal in the U.S., these advertisements explicitly make requests for male or female workers, often accompanied by requirements for certain age ranges, height, attractiveness, as well as other physical characteristics. Additionally, employers often list the desired qualities and personality traits they hope to find in candidates in ways that further reinforce gender norms.
These postings occupy a legal grey area: they are in Chinese, and highly informal. Advertisements often provide little to no identifying information that can be traced back to a business or employer. Additionally, the online platforms follow hiring practices Mainland China, where discrimination laws are weak and have only been nominally enforced while employers continue to get around new regulations in a continuous game of cat-and-mouse.
This study looks at the restaurant and nail salon industries as two of the major employers of Chinese immigrants in the ethnic economy. Even in the mainstream economy, these two industries have long been noted for a high degree of occupational segregation. According to the Bureau of Labor, over 78% of manicure and pedicure workers and 67% of restaurant servers in America were women in 2021, as opposed to only 21.7% of head chefs and cooks.
Similarly, in businesses owned by Chinese immigrants, men are primarily hired as kitchen workers in the restaurant industry, and kitchens remain a predominantly male space that female workers are largely excluded from. Instead, female workers are mostly hired as servers or in other customer service positions. On the other hand, nail salons often require workers to be female, explicitly discouraging male applicants from applying. Even when male workers are hired, they are often expected to take on manual labor roles such as driving.
The gendered labor divide is reinforced by the online practice of seeking matrimonial workers, in which employers hire a husband-and-wife team who are expected to enact a typical gender division of labor. In most cases, the husband is assigned to a position involving manual labor and the wife to a customer-facing job, such as hiring the husband as a line cook while hiring the wife as a server or cashier. Since immigrant employers provide room and board, usually in locations outside of large cities where there are fewer local Chinese immigrants to hire, employers can cut costs by rooming the couple together.
Advertisements offer detailed descriptions of desired personality characteristics, signaling before workers even begin the job, that they should exude traits associated with masculinity and femininity, such as stoic discipline or warm collegiality to qualify for the position. Employers in restaurants attempt to construct the image of a stoic and hardworking working-class masculinity, often by emphasizing the ability of male workers to endure grueling hours of hard work , as seen in an advertisement that reads, “Hiring male kitchen worker, hardworking and capable, movements are fast and smooth.”
Many employers request male applicants who are not argumentative or prone to conflict, assuming men to be less social and more confrontational. Descriptions of workplace relations also tend to focus on how they will be of minimum trouble to workers. Accordingly, employers are described in terms of management style rather than character, and coworker relations are emphasized for their simplicity and straightforwardness rather than emphasizing a sense of community.
On the other hand, women in service positions, whether as nail technicians or as servers are held to standards of hetero-normative femininity. There are also higher barriers to entry in the nail salon industry that may include requirements for English, legal working status, as well as nail technician licenses. This disproportionately requires female workers to have higher qualifications than male workers.
Employers are more likely to explicitly ask for young female workers in the nail salon industry, demanding them to fit the image expected by customers, while there are fewer such requests when it comes to male workers in either industry. Both formal and informal age limits are expressed in advertisements, including through signaling that “everyone is young” or emphasizing the “young and energetic” atmosphere of the workplace to implicitly exclude older workers.
Female workers in the nail salon industry are expected to provide customers a comfortable experience, both through their technical skills as manicurists and through friendly conversation and banter. Advertisements often discuss relationships with customers, with generalizations based on racial and class-based stereotypes about their personalities. Employers often use “good neighborhood” to signify upper and middle-class neighborhoods with high concentrations of White and/or Asian residents. This is sometimes explicitly stated by advertisements that describe the location as being in “a good white neighborhood”, with some even going further to specify that “there are no black customers”. Notably, such descriptions rarely appear in the restaurant industry, even for service positions.
In the same vein, job advertisements for nail salons place a stronger emphasis on gender norms of women’s sociability, often describing workplace relations and the work environment in detail. The relationships between coworkers are often described as friendly, while bosses are not just described in terms of management style but also personality and character–advertisements often make a point to characterize employers as “kind” and caring.
Job advertisements serve as a way of enforcing control over workers, as they actively shape gender segregation, and further serve as a way to police applicants who do not adhere to gender norms by excluding them from eligibility. Workers who do not conform to gender norms may self-select out of jobs with clear requirements for them to behave in a certain way based on their gender. Alternatively, they must mold themselves to the demands of their employers, whether that is to take on the act of a stoic and uncomplaining masculinity that can endure the grueling physical demands of the restaurant kitchen, or a sociable and attentive femininity that can provide a pleasant experience to customers through detailed work and friendly demeanor. In this process, exploitative conditions for male workers are glorified as upholding their masculine identities, while the taxing nature of service work is downplayed as aligning with female worker’s natural dispositions. As workers uphold gendered stereotypes according to employer preferences, their behavior further serves to justify upholding existing occupational segregation and labor practices, with men seen as being unsuited to service roles due to their “natural” reticence, and women seen as being too fragile to endure the grueling labor of the kitchens. They also solidify biases in a digital environment that can reach a broader audience more easily than ever before.
As the hiring practices of the ethnic economy become digitized, features of their desired workers that were once conveyed in personal conversation, are now broadcast on job platforms for all to see, with few filters. Employers must clearly articulate the gendered qualities they desire in their workers through online job advertisements. These are broadcast beyond their personal networks or professional employment agencies as they digitally reproduce and reinforce gender norms. While the study focuses on Chinese immigrants, these findings also provide a window into the gender norms that shape persistent occupational segregation in the broader labor market despite federal laws that prevent discrimination in the hiring process.
Author
Anna Zhang is a PhD Candidate at Northeastern University. Her research examines the impact of digital technologies on immigrants’ outcomes and experiences in the labor market, with a particular focus on how social inequalities are reproduced in this process.
Read More
Anna Y Zhang, Gender and Work: Online Job Platforms of the Chinese Ethnic Economy, Social Problems, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1093/socpro/spaf025
Photo by Magda Ehlers from Pexels.