Auditing ethnic preference in Hong Kong’s financial job market: The mediation of white privilege and Hong Kong localism

Abstract

Using the case of Hong Kong’s finance-related industries, this article examines whether preference or discrimination based on job applicants’ ethnic background manifests in Hong Kong employers’ hiring practices. The authors took an audit approach and compared applicants of three distinctive ethnic groups: Anglo-Saxons, local Hong Kongers, and mainland Chinese. They found that in Hong Kong, local applicants receive the highest callback rate, followed by mainland Chinese, and then Anglo-Saxon applicants, regardless of their gender. The findings counter existing literature and suggest white privilege and colonial legacy is not visible in the hiring for college graduate positions in the financial industries. Instead, language (Cantonese) fluency and business ties to China are of greater importance to employers/HR in Hong Kong’s finance-related industries. In other words, white privilege may still hold true in socio-cultural spheres or everyday interactions, but the effects can be mediated by Cantonese language proficiency when it comes to hiring practices.

‘But you’re white’: An autoethnography of whiteness and white privilege in East Asian universities

“…In some respects, 'Japanese privilege' may be more pervasive than white privilege in Japan then, which may be related to a unique phenomenon in the Japanese context whereby Japanese people may understand themselves as being even more entitled to claim ownership of whiteness than those who we usually think of as white (Bonnett 2002). Similar patterns have also been found in other East Asian contexts, such as in Hong Kong and Singapore, where 'Chinese privilege' may be increasingly superseding white privilege (Barr andSkrbiš 2011 [2008]; Groves & O'Connor 2020;Li and Liu 2021;Zainal and Abdullah 2019). Thus, it is evident that whiteness is not an unfettered key to unbridled privileged in East Asia which may mean that white academics may be resented, perceived as a nuisance, and may even be viewed as symbolising a legacy of imperialism.…”

Bourdieusian Boundary-Making, Social Networks, and Capital Conversion: Inequality among International Degree Holders in Hong Kong

“…They are distracted by their preoccupation with symbolic capital to the extent that they choose to overlook economic structures as an explanandum for instances when locals perform worse or when they themselves struggle to find a job. Within this scope, though they may notice changes in the education field insofar as their degrees held diminishing returns, they were less quick to accept changing preferences in the labor market, such as Mandarin proficiency (Li & Liu, 2021). Part of participants' subjective disregard for these changing preferences was likely because they studied in Anglo-American societies, where Mandarin was not a commonly spoken language.…”