medical ailments caused by poor working conditions; a lack of medical treatment; unsanitary food; and unlivable and unsafe dormitories. Uyghurs, including college graduates who are fluent in Mandarin Chinese, are systematically subjected to blatant and overwhelming employment discrimination for both government jobs and private sector jobs (including private sector jobs publicized by local governments) in Xinjiang. Uyghur women are subjected to discrimination both because they are Uyghur and because they're female. Online notices for state-sector jobs accessed by the Uyghur Human Rights Project in 2009 set forth explicit ethnic and gender requirements that demonstrated a clear bias in favor of Han Chinese applicants and against Uyghurs and other non-Han groups, as well as against women of any ethnicity. Against the backdrop of the government's intense repression of all Uyghurs' practice of religion and independent expressions of ethnicity, the authorities have targeted the following repressive measures specifically against Uyghur women. Local governments have also reported on measures to politically train or regulate the activities of Uyghur female religious figures (known as buwi in Uyghur). In December 2008, the Xinjiang People's Political Consultative Conference set forth a proposal initiated by the Vice Chairwoman of the Xinjiang Women's Federation, on bringing buwi under government and party management. The proposal states, among other things, that buwi have existed in a "no-man's land" without state oversight, and calls for using these women's social status to spread the CCP's religious and ethnic policies among Muslim women. According to Article 15 of the Xinjiang Regulation on Population and Family Planning, Uyghurs and other ethnic minority couples are allowed to have three children in rural areas and two children in urban areas. While Uyghur couples are permitted to have more children than Han couples, they are subjected to many of the same coercive and abusive population planning practices to which Han are subjected and in recent years, the XUAR authorities have actually targeted their population planning enforcement activities in areas of the Uyghur region with predominantly non-Han populations. The coercive and abusive population planning practices to which Uyghur women have been subjected have included forced abortions and sterilizations. Individuals, acting in an official capacity, such as family planning officials, in the XUAR have forcibly taken Uyghur women from their homes and have subjected them to forced abortions and forced sterilizations. Some men have also been forced to have sterilizations. Uyghur women have suffered permanent health damage or even died as a result of negligent surgery during these forced operations. Population planning officials' career advancement is routinely linked to their enforcement of a set birth quotas and this has created an incentive structure for officials to use coercive measures. The following recent case highlighted the human rights abuses involved in the population planning system in Xinjiang. In November 2008, local authorities within the Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture of the XUAR announced plans to force Arzigul Tursun, a Uyghur woman from Ghulja county who was six months pregnant with her third child, to undergo an abortion after she was unable to pay a 45,000 yuan (US $6,591) fine for exceeding the number of children permitted under the region's population planning regulation. Arzigul escaped from the hospital to which she was forcibly taken for the abortion, but the authorities tracked her down and took her back to the hospital. Following intense international advocacy on her behalf, including from two U.S. Congressmen and the U.S. Ambassador 2