The social status of women in China is receiving a lot of attention again, and this time there might be good news. A study out of accounting firm Grant Thorton’s Beijing Branch claims that the proportion of women in senior management positions has jumped from 25% to a staggering 51%. Of the 200 businesses surveyed, 94% of them had women in these upper level positions. This seems like a great finding for women in China, but Laurie Burkitt of the Wall Street Journal advises that the news should be taken with a grain of salt.
Burkitt cites a new study by National University of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy and the New York-based Asia Society. Their findings claim that five Chinese men are in a senior position in the workplace for each one woman that reaches a comparable position. Burkitt also points out that just 10 of the 205 members of the Communist Party’s Central Committee are women. Even Chinese views on whether women should be in the workplace at all have been sliding. In a 2010 survey:
61.6% of men and 54.6% of women said that “men belong in public life and women belong at home,” an increase of 7.7 and 4.4 percentage points respectively from 2000.
It certainly looks like attitudes on women in the workplace are changing in China. The direction of that change remains an open question.
Comments 4
Andy — March 21, 2013
I do trust all of the concepts you've presented for your post. They are very convincing and can certainly work. Still, the posts are too brief for starters. May just you please prolong them a bit from subsequent time? Thank you for the post.
anonymous — March 21, 2013
If possible I'd like some more research shown on Chinese ideas of gender roles. My father, despite his extraordinary sexism, was always big on education and made sure that his daughters got the best education possible. I, his youngest, am now going into graduate school for neuroscience.
I'm not sure whether it's for the status among chinese americans or my father's genuine love for science and education, but he's never once implied to me or my sisters that our gender would get in the way of intelligence or hard work, and it's a complete non-issue that we girls could become scientists and doctors, unlike other americans. So is it just my father, or is it an overall Chinese notion that women are not necessarily less intelligent/capable than men?
Friday Roundup: March 22, 2013 » The Editors' Desk — March 22, 2013
[...] “Contradictions on Chinese Women in Charge,” by Andrew Wiebe. In which social science tempers a new finding that 51% of Chinese organizations have women in senior leadership positions. [...]
Wang — December 18, 2017
Although Chinese women are certainly making in roads into the paid workplace, I think the expectation on men to be the primary breadwinner and primary agent to maximize family income has not changed much. ... In the US, this is partially responsible for the "stalled revolution." I think it did not stop women as much as in the US because Chinese family has one child policy that reduced the childcare "burden."