On April 29, amidst a series of posts on Popular Chinese e-commerce website Alibaba.com, was a rather strange job posting seeking a beautiful woman for the post of a “Programmer Encouragement Specialist.”
Yes, you read that right.
The job role included:
-Possessing beauty that exceeds nature
-Being open minded like porn star Sora Aoi
-Flattering and complimenting colleagues
-Waking up programmers early for morning meetings
-And, ‘exciting’ your colleagues.
No points for guessing what Alibaba expected women to do for this position. The posting was for Dingtalk, Alibaba’s messaging app
After facing media out lash and flak from people, the website put down the posting. However, here is a screenshot of the post, in Chinese, posted by a Twitter user:
The text says that this isn’t a job for a programmer, it’s ‘for’ a programmer.
Talking to Quartz, an Alibaba spokesperson said,” The ad was intended to be an attempt at humorous marketing to recruit IT talent. We apologize to anyone offended by this ad and have taken it down.” The statement added, “Alibaba is committed to providing equal opportunity and fair treatment to all employees on the basis of merit, without discrimination.”
Alibaba is reportedly still advertising for the position, after removing the references to porn stars and women.
This story was first published on Quartz.