China updated its decades-old women’s law to improve gender equality, days after the Communist Party excluded women from its upper echelons for the first time in 25 years.

The nation’s top legislative body passed an amendment to the Women’s Rights and Interests Protection Law on Sunday, according to a statement on the website of China’s National People’s Congress. The revised law will be adopted from 2023.

The government should take necessary measures to eliminate all forms of discrimination against women, according to the revised law. The amendment prohibits restricting the promotion of female employees due to marriage, pregnancy, maternity leave and other circumstances at the workplace. The law also requires lower level governments and their officials to report suspected abduction or trafficking of women to the police in a timely manner.

The amendment instructs local governments to strengthen the protection of women’s rights, Zang Tiewei, spokesman for the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress legislative affairs commission, said at a briefing last week.

"The revision is based on in-depth research, focusing on solving thorny problems in the field of women’s rights,” Zang said, according to Chinese trade publication 21st Century Business Herald. He named sexual harassment and workplace discrimination as issues the law tried to combat, adding that the legislation should "support women to better balance childbearing and work.”

An earlier draft of the amendment banned employers from stating gender preferences in job ads or asking female applicants about their marital or pregnancy status. It also ordered companies to set up mechanisms to prevent, investigate and respond to such complaints, although the legal ramifications for failing to do so were unclear.

Women in China are facing growing pressure to revert to traditional caregiver roles as its aging society grapples with record low birth rates and marriage numbers. President Xi Jinping has told women to "shoulder the responsibilities of taking care of the old and young, as well as educating children,” according to a compilation of his comments published in the People’s Daily in 2020.

Meanwhile, the ruling party has repeatedly suppressed the country’s nascent #MeToo movement, viewing it as a vehicle for spreading liberal Western values. Women who have spoken about up sexual assault have been routinely silenced.

The updates to the women’s law come as Xi’s latest leadership team took a major step back in gender equality this month. The world’s most-populous nation won’t have a woman sitting on its top-decision making Politburo for the first time in a quarter century, after the party failed to replace the panel’s sole woman, Sun Chunlan, who retired.

Perhaps preempting criticisms of flaws in China’s system, Zang said at last week’s briefing that the nation’s updated law would not "copy measures in the Western system.”