BEIJING — Fresh out of college, Angela Li was proud of her job as a teller at the state-owned China Everbright Bank — maybe it wasn’t exciting, but it had prospects. After a year and a half she applied for a promotion, along with a male colleague who had joined with her.

He got it. She did not.

“Our boss came to talk to me afterwards,” said Ms. Li, a 25-year-old with scraped-back hair and a quiet gaze. “He said, ‘It’s good that you girls take your work seriously. But you should be focusing on finding a boyfriend, getting married, having a kid.’ ”

Ms. Li quit.

“I could compete in terms of ability, but not in terms of gender,” she said.

China is often held up as a model for women in Asia. Women made great strides in the early decades of Communist rule, and the government has taken pains to portray women as equal to men, starting with Chairman Mao’s declaration that women “hold up half the sky.”

More recently, as China has shifted to a market economy, admiring reports of “wonder women,” often promulgated by state media, suggest that Chinese women have made it in business.