[交流] 【Share】Women who want to run the world

To understand the changing role of women in China, consider the runaway success of a novel titled Du Lala's Rise. Decades after Mao Zedong declared that "women hold up half the sky," the success of Du Lala and her peers reflects a curious fact about women in China: they appear to be far more ambitious than their counterparts in the United States. According to a study completed earlier this year by the New York–based Center for Work-Life Policy, just over one third of all college-educated American women describe themselves as very ambitious. In China that figure is closer to two thirds. What's more, over 75 percent of women in China aspire to hold a top corporate job, compared with just over half in the US, and 77 percent of Chinese women participate in the workforce, compared with 69 percent in the US. Ripa Rashid, a senior vice president at the Center for Work-Life Policy, says the rapid growth "creates this excitement," and builds on a cultural and historical legacy in which Chinese women are not just encouraged to participate in the workforce, they are expected to. One result has been a generation of women and girls who believe they belong among China's power elite. In the US, that shift followed decades of pitched battles over equality and women's rights. In China, there are fewer institutional barriers for women trying to succeed professionally, says Judi Kilachand, an executive director at the Asia Society. Female leaders are therefore viewed as more common. Today China has a greater percentage of women in its Parliament - 21.3 percent - than the US does in Congress. That's true, too, in the executive suite. Grant Thornton International, the tax consultancy, found that roughly eight out of 10 companies in China had women in senior management roles, compared with approximately half in the European Union and two thirds in the US. Similarly, in China, 31 percent of top executives are female, compared with 20 percent in America.

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