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The news about sexism in China's high tech industry is out and it's all over the internet:

The most damning account of all comes in Lijia Zhang's "Chinese Tech Companies’ Dirty Secret" (New York Times Opinion, 4/23/18), which includes a video presentation. At 1:34, there's a job ad from the Chinese tech company Meituan which is so disgusting that I've purposely put the screenshots on the second page. (What follows in the video is even more repulsive.) I didn't want to pass up the Meituan ad altogether, however, because it does have an interesting linguistic hook.





zhǎo gōngzuò = zhǎo nǚrén 找工作=找女人

gàn nǐ zuì xiǎng gàn de 干你最想干的

You can see for yourself how the creators of the New York Times video translated those lines into English. If it weren't for the prurient purpose of the ad (note the whole series of posters on the wall behind showing the bottom half of a woman in various stages of undress), the second line would have been better translated as "Do what you want to do most".

The admen are intentionally playing with the infamous gàn 干 ("do; f*ck"; it also has many other meanings, including, when read in first tone, "dry"), with which we here at Language Log are thoroughly familiar:

— to cite only a few of the many posts in which the grotesquely polysemous gàn 干 is featured.

These ads may strike us as unimaginable, but in a country where gross gender inequality is a fact of life, they are not unexpected. So far as I know, there has never been a female member of the Standing Committee of the Politburo, perhaps not even of the Politburo itself. Nor am I aware of female members of the equivalent of our Cabinet, though I do remember one female State Councilor. Occasionally there have been and still are female Foreign Ministry spokespersons who can cutely reprimand other nations for not obeying China's dictates.

[Thanks to Ben Zimmer, June Teufel Dreyer, and Yana Way]

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