“I think multinational companies like to recruit women in China,” an ex-pat female senior executive in Beijing explained to me recently. “They are more likely to have the language skills, a cooperative management style, and are enthusiastic about working for foreign firms which are more likely to promote them.” That may be why the leadership team I was working with last week was the reverse of what I see in most countries: women outnumbered men.
Some of the research confirms this impression, putting China way ahead of the US and making most Western countries look like a bastion of backwardness. An example is the latest Grant Thornton report, which puts China’s senior management at 51% female, which would make it the first country to have a majority of female executives.
Now, some of this data has to be taken with more than a grain of salt, especially since last year’s report from the same survey had just 25% of Chinese senior managers as female. Even China can’t possibly change that fast. (Asked about this, Grant Thornton agreed they would have to review their criteria.) Yet it does seem to reflect the reality of what I have seen in many multinationals’ statistics. Foreign firms are tapping into a vibrant pool of high-performing female talent in China in greater numbers than they do in most western countries. This is also true in a number of other emerging countries.
International companies are discovering that they can often cherry pick the very best female talent in countries where the local firms still discriminate against women. They also discover that the best male talent would often rather work for local firms which may offer better long-term prospects and tempting job roles without having to leave the country. So the choice, as one manager put it to me, is simple: “In terms of local talent, it’s between first-rate women or second-rate men.”
Smart, highly educated, ambitious women are increasingly learning to prefer the opportunities that global companies offer them over the sometimes-stodgy cultural norms of local firms that are reluctant to promote them. And interestingly, the result is that multinational companies end up with better gender balance in new markets than they ever managed to get at home.
Female executives are also more loyal than their male counterparts, Sylvia Ann Hewlett’s work on the female talent pool in China has found. In China’s red hot, hard-to-retain talent market, that should be soothing music to recruiters’ ears. “88% of women are loyal to their current employers,” she found, “And 76% are willing to go the extra mile.”
The World Economic Forum has found that China has a gender gap that favors women at “professional and technical” levels (where there are 1.08 women for every man) and in university education (where there are 1.1 women for every man). China has a 74% female labor force participation level, the highest of all the BRIC countries.
And yet it’s not all good news — according to the WEF, only 17% of “legislators and managers” are female, a number the OECD data (shown at right) agrees with. Now, this merging of private and public sector is not very helpful, as it is clear that women are hugely under-represented in the Communist Party’s senior echelons (where many may argue the real power lies).
So what’s going on? Is there a new “gap” we can start to name the Mature Market Gender Gap, where western companies will increasingly gender balance in growth markets while remaining unbalanced at home? And where local companies in growth markets perpetuate a male dominated model?
If this is true, it will certainly make for some interesting future analyses of the competitive advantages of gender balanced workplaces. In the meantime, expect to see a lot of global companies start to move their senior Chinese, Russian and Brazilian women around to improve their overall gender balance. As companies strive for more senior executives that are both women and from growth markets, they may find that they can, if you’ll pardon the pun, get two birds with one chick.
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don’t believe everything you see it a tv show there has to be drama and conflict and resolution its tv 
