Open Discrimination, But That's Okay

Today, a friend sent me a unique job posting that I thought was worthy of being shared. A "Blind Man Massage" place was looking for some masseurs in the small city of Huizhou in Guangdong Province, not far from Guangzhou. The listing was looking for people age 18-34 with at least 3 years prior experience, nothing unusual so far, right? The interesting thing, though, was when it came to salary, they were offering males RMB1,000/month and females RMB1,200/month. Upon further questioning, the contact person explained that they already had a number of male masseurs and the higher salary was an attempt to attract some females.

I know there is no concept of "equal pay for equal work" (though this one does benefit the ladies), but its rare that I've come across such outright examples. What also was a bit striking was the salary. Considering I've seen articles from just a few years back that put the average salary of a university graduate at RMB2,000, for a blind person, who in many cases would be around the same age or younger than a university grad, to be making RMB1,000 in a small city isn't that bad by local standards. The real difference comes when you look at promotion tracks, the RMB2,000 a university student made is going to rise considerably over the years, but a 22 year old blind person working as a masseur (one of the only jobs available to him/her) won't expect much of any raise in the future and the main hope is to earn enough to open their own shop.