We traveled to a town outside of Shanghai to meet Sharon Shao, who graduated with a computer engineering degree from one of China’s top universities. As is only befitting a math whiz, she picked us up at the train station in a white car with an “E = mc²” sticker plastered on the side. We found a private room in a teahouse where Ms. Shao, over several hours, alternated between anger and tears as she told us about her tumultuous relationship with her ex-husband. When she finally worked up the courage to divorce her husband, she said, she walked away with no claim to the apartment that she had helped pay for because, as is the case for millions of other Chinese women, her name was not on the deed.

“My friends always tell me to just keep quiet and move on,” said Ms. Shao. “But I want to share my story so other women can learn from my mistakes.”

By the end of our reporting, we had talked to dozens of women. I was stunned to find that nearly every woman we spoke with had a personal story to tell about egregious discrimination at the workplace or in the home.

One woman told me about how she dreamed every night of going back to work after she was forced out of a prestigious job when she had a child. Another woman said she wanted to leave her husband but was afraid because her name was not on the deed.

“If I divorce, I will lose everything,” she said.

“The more I think about it,” she added, “the more difficult it feels to escape this dead end.”

But as is increasingly the case in China these days, very few were willing to go on the record. This has become the reality of reporting in an increasingly authoritarian country whose — mostly male — leaders are so obsessed with controlling the narrative that even videos depicting extramarital affairs are subject to government censorship.

I understood why many women didn’t want to take the risk. Since China’s leader, Xi Jinping, took power in 2012, we have seen the detention of feminist activists, a crackdown on the burgeoning #MeToo movement and the emergence of “female morality schools” in which women are made to scrub floors and are taught how to apologize to their husbands.