China's Female Factory Workers Face Widespread Sexual Harassment

For seven years, Luo Hongmei toiled in factories in China’s southern Guangdong province, experiencing firsthand the daily struggles that face millions of young female workers before deciding to join China’s fledgling labor-rights movement. As director of the Guangdong-based nonprofit Sunflower Women Workers Center, her mission is to bring attention to—and, she hopes, find solutions for—women’s workplace issues, such as unpaid maternity benefits and illegal firings for becoming pregnant.

Recently Luo oversaw a study about another disturbingly common and little-discussed problem: rampant sexual harassment (PDF). Seventy percent of female factory workers who answered a survey the center conducted in fall 2013 said they had experienced some form of workplace sexual harassment. One in four said they had received obscene phone calls or pornographic messages, almost one in 10 reported having been directly propositioned for sex at work, and 15 percent had quit their jobs because of unwanted sexual attention that neither factory management nor police ventured to stop.