By Amy Chen

From Production Manager at Lululemon to Administrative Assistant at RBC, many job postings in Metro Vancouver are demanding fluency in Mandarin as a mandatory requirement even for jobs that doesn’t require communicating with customers or vendors in East Asia, according to analysis of data from popular job posting sites.

The job title with the highest percentage of postings that require Mandarin was “Mortgage Broker” at 10%, followed closely by “Real Estate Agent” at 9%, and “Investment Advisor” at 8%, our analysis of approximately 41,000 job postings on Indeed, Monster and Job Bank.

Approximately 5% of jobs in Sales and Office Administration required Mandarin skills.

Of the titles we analysed, the ones with the lowest percentage of postings requiring Mandarin were the ones in science, technology and engineering, with less than 2% for all titles we searched.

In terms of keyword searches, we found that job postings that contained the word “affluent” in them were 15% likely to require Mandarin language fluency, while the number for “luxury” was 11%.

It must be noted that our numbers do not include listing from Chinese-language sites such as Vansky.

While some see the Mandarin language requirements as a sign of diversity, many we interviewed saw them as a form of discrimination, but were reluctant to speak on the matter for the fear of being labelled racist.

“I’m an immigrant and I’m going to LINC[Language Instruction for Newcomers to Canada] classes four days a week to learn English properly,” recent Brazilian immigrant with banking sector experience, who only wanted to be known by her first name Laura, said. “But some chose not to put in that effort, and I’m disappointed to see even major employers like banks discriminate against me by catering to [affluent clientele].”