WSJ: “On this year’s Women’s Day, a host of Chinese media outlets are trumpeting a new study that finds China’s businesses rank the highest in the world for employing women in senior management roles.
The proportion of women in senior management in China has climbed to 51% this year, up from 25% in 2012 and outpacing the global average of 21%, according to the study, produced by the Beijing arm of accounting firm Grant Thornton. In a survey of 200 businesses in China, 94% of them employed women in senior roles, the study said.
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Woman do manual labour in a garden outside an office block on International Women’s Day in Shanghai on March 8, 2013.
The survey’s findings would seem to represent great news for women in a country with a long history of entrenched patriarchy – except they conflict significantly with other studies that show Chinese women have actually been losing ground in the labor force, politics and society.
One recent study by National University of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy and the New York-based Asia Society, for every five Chinese men who rises to a senior position in the workplace only one woman achieves the same level of advancement. The ratio is even more lopsided inside the Communist Party: In the party’s Central Committee, where major policy decisions are discussed, only 10 of the 205 members are women, and no woman has ever held a spot on the Politburo Standing Committee, the party’s top decision-making body.
Things are slightly better in the country’s rubber-stamp parliament, the National People’s Congress, where 23% of the 2,987 delegates are female.
In the World Economic Forum’s gender equality index, an annual ranking of countries by their ability to develop, retain and attract female talent, China’s ranking declined to 69th last year, down from 57th in 2008.”
via Women Gain Ground in China. Or Do They? – China Real Time Report – WSJ.
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