Forgot I could add a comment here. I had my final round interview for Research and Innovation management trainee position at L’Oréal China last December with its R&I department’s HR director Scarlet Zhu; the experience was an absolute nightmare. The director was rude, arrogant, and impotent, clearly not no idea about even basic science. First of all, I was studying in the UK so I had to get up at midnights for the interview, but after I waited for 10 minutes after the scheduled interview time, I received a call saying that the director could not do the interview because she had an emergency, and I had to get up at midnight again on the second day for the rescheduled interview. The interviewer did not seem to feel sorry at all, and things got even worse after she began to ask questions. The most annoying thing was that the interviewer seemed to be very suspicious about my academic background for no reason (as I was studying at a top UK university). She asked me my university awarded Honours degree to students (as I was awarded one) and after I explained to her, she gave a very sneaky and arrogant smile and said “Oh this was not the way your university do! Really? No!” I think this was very offensive and disrespectful as I was the one who has actually studied here and she was in no position to challenge me on that in such a disrespectful attitude. She kept being extremely arrogant throughout the whole interview and rudely judged me at the end “you are not quite interested at science and not suitable to do R&I research, marketing is better for you” even though I had studied science at a top institution for four years. Moreover, this HR director for R&I function clearly did not have any basic knowledge of science. She asked about my research project, I explained to her, and she was not even responding to some simple terms like “NMR”. I explained in the same way as I did to my high school students for my part-time tutoring job and they had no problem understanding my research project, where as Ms Scarlet did not understand at all. Not to mention she felt that the key for their scientists to succeed was to work overtime, and the ideal candidate for this entry-level position would be someone who was an expert in fields from optics to organic synthesis to programming — sorry I did not even know a professor who was good at all these fields. Overall this was an awful interview experience. No matter which position you are at or how prestigious you feel about your company (or yourself actually), you are in no position to treat your candidate with absolute no respect and pure prejudice. Ps, one more thing, I probably don’t have any direct evidence and I’m not accusing the company, but it’s likely there was gender discrimination during the recruitment process, at least for this position. During the group discussion, the male candidates’ backgrounds were significantly less good than the female candidates, e.g 2nd/3rd tier universities against 1st tier universities. Also, for the same position I applied for at ELC and J&J China, more than 90% of the shortlisted candidates who entered the group discussions stage were female, while the percentage was only 40%-50%. Again I’m not accusing the company, but I would just like to warn other females candidates if they happen to see this comment and decide how much time and efforts they should invest into this application.