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Tianjin, China - Every afternoon, in the small courtyard outside Machang Street Re-employment center, small groups of laid-off workers anxiously scan the day's help-wanted listings. There is a sad sameness about this army of job hopefuls, each one dressed up, ready for an interview at any time: they are all women, all over 35 and all skilled. "At our factory everyone who was laid off was a woman," said Sun Jingqi, 41, a former textile worker. "Look around you, everyone here is female," added Ms. Sun, who had put on heels and makeup and a smart red sweater outfit for yet another trip to check the board. "Now what can we do? We're not young enough. We don't have experience."

As China struggles to convert to a market economy, closing and shrinking state-owned industries, women over 35 have born the brunt of the pain: they are far more likely to be laid off and far less likely to find a new iob than any other group. These women were the worker ants who for decades populated factory floors in an array of state industries that have now shrunk or mechanized, from textile mills to chemical plants. They learned few skills despite years of work, and are mostly poorly educated, belonging to a generation that came of age during the Cultural Revolution, when most of China's universities were shut down. But they suffer, too, from outright discrimination and deeply held cultural biases about the limited abilities of women, particularly women over 35. Such biases have free play in a country where want ads often specify sex - not to mention height, age and body characteristics. "If you're over 35, it's very hard to find work," said a sad-looking 43year-old woman at the job center who would give only her last name, Yang. She said she had been laid off this year from a food processing plant and was preparing to go out on an interview for a part-time job cleaning windows at 60 cents an hour. "What can you do?" she asked. "You have young and old ones to look after. You're too old to learn new skills. You're not attractive anymore. Nobody wants us." Not surprisingly, Chinese surveys have found higher-than-normal rates of depression, family violence and divorce in households where women have been laid off. "Women who've been laid off don't just need jobs, they also need emotional help," said Tan Lin, a population expert at Nankai University here. "They lose their chance to be employed, or re-employed. They sit home lonely and feel depressed."

Last year women accounted for only 39 percent of China's work force but nearly 61 percent of its laid-off workers, according to the Ministry of Labor. What is more, 75 percent of laid-off women are still unemployed after one year, surveys show, compared with under 50 percent of their male counterparts. The problem is so great that the Chinese have coined a phrase, a kind of acronym meaning "laid-off women workers," to describe this pitiable group. The problem is particularly serious in places like Tianjin, a sprawling coastal manufacturing city of nine million people that is a center of textile industry and so was stung by 320,000 layoffs in 1997 alone. Since jobs at state industries have historically come with a wide range of social benefits, laid-off workers often lose medical care, child care and funeral benefits as well as a job. The Government, and especially the governmental women's federations that exist in every Chinese city town, have done much hand ringing about the laid-off women, organizing courses to teach them skills and operating job centers. While The China Women's News, a prominent daily, and small, informal women's groups have made efforts publicize their fate, the laid-off workers themselves have been mostly silent, in a tightly controlled country that allows few opportunities to express personal views. But their efforts have been only mildly successful, and have inevitably stressed a return to unskilled, low-wage labor. "The training programs they offer have reinforced stereotypes about women's work and skills," said Ching Kwan Lee, a sociologist at the City University of Hong Kong: "beautician, seamstress, domestic helper, child care."

Ten years ago, when the Government still assigned jobs, the Communist Party made sure that women were well represented in companies and factories. But now women in the work force can choose and be chosen, and market forces have not been so kind. Although discrimination in hiring is technically illegal, many companies openly favor men over women for certain types of work, and there are few means of redress. "It's harder for women to find work," said a recent law school graduate in the midst of a job search, who gave only her surname, Wang, for fear of angering would-be employers. "When they are willing to hire a woman, they want someone who's beautiful and capable, too." She said many companies thought jobs were too strenuous for women if they involved travel or work in rural towns considered too rough. Companies are even more reluctant to hire women over 35 since, in China, they tend to bear full responsibility for both child care and elder care, researchers say. They add that these women possess few working skills, even compared with the men from their former factories, who had tended to hold the technical jobs. Government officials say they expect that most laid-off workers will find jobs in the service sector, which is growing as industries shrink. But they acknowledge that women over 35 have few prospects in a sector obsessed with youth and beauty.

Consider the ad placed by Jinzhiyuan Garment Company in Beijing Youth Daily: "Secretary, Beijing resident, female, under 30, above 1.65 meters, must have regular features." Or one by L'Oreal Cosmetics: "Promotion rep., female, under 28 years old, above 1.65 meters tall, white skin, skinny, healthy." As Zhang Yongping, director of the Machang Street Labor Market, put it "We have found it very difficult to get women over 40 re-employed. There are not so many jobs and, of course, the catering services, department stores and private companies want the younger ones." He said that such women could only find jobs through women's federations or "neighborhood committees," grass-roots groups that in the past focused on enforcing the one-child-per-family policy and reporting on suspicious political activity. They, have recently branched out, offering dry-cleaning services and help finding jobs, among other things. Gen Wei, an earnest middle-aged women with a hard-working air, runs the job placement program at the Sanheli Neighborhood Committee, which covers 5,000 people in a compound of dreary apartment blocks. She shook her head as she flipped through a binder containing 100 forms from people looking for work, about 80 percent women. She said she had found part-time work for 40: delivering newspapers; cooking in a company canteen; helping with child care; elder care or housework. "The men are easiest," she said. "They usually have a skill, like fixing plumbing. The women are harder. They have no skills, especially women over 40."

Through the committee's help, Liu Xiuhong, a quiet 48-year-old, has found work as a part-time nanny. Ms. Liu said she was among 100 women laid off by a state-owned sewing machine factory last year. Although the factory is supposed to give her a monthly unemployment payment as well as medical coverage, she has received nothing since' January, she said. She makes about $30 a month as a nanny.

The Tianjin Women's Federation has set up something called the Home Service Company, which offers laid-off factory workers jobs as domestics. Since 1997, 80,000 women have come for help to the Tianjin Women's Federation, said Wang Zhiguo, its chairwoman, who estimated' that 10,000 had been retrained. Xiao Yuhua, 38, a cheerful woman with, a broad grin, said she had tripled, her income, to $130 a month, since she started work as a housekeeper for the Women's Federation Home Service Company; she was laid off from her job at Tianjin No. 1 Textile Plant 3 years ago.

Kang Li, 31, who had coiffed hair, bright red lipstick and a cell phone, said the federation had helped her start a business selling steamed buns, after she was laid off from her, job at a handicraft company in 1995. But such success will be harder to come by now, as the number of unemployed women started rising much faster last year. Last month the United Nations Development Program and the Chinese Government announced a $1 million, three-year project to help the laid-off women in Tianjin, teaching them technical and business skills as well as giving them small new-business loans. Significantly, the program also includes gender sensitivity training for employment officials, who are quick to confide that a woman, at 40, is "too old" to learn to use a computer, or "too fat" to be hired.' In China, as elsewhere, women seem to have absorbed such biases themselves. "Being laid off is difficult for men and women, but the men recover quickly," said Yang Xiyuan, a retired lawyer in Beijing. She added: "I met women who'd been laid off from a textile-factory who were given new jobs in a bank, but they learned too slowly. They were all in their 40's, so their reactions were not very quick. They just couldn't do it fast enough."