Leading from the front

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Leading from the front
Published: December 10 2010 19:29 | Last updated: December 10 2010 19:29

FT writers and editors pick their most influential women of the past 10 years across the globe, from Nobel prize-winning scientists to political activists and technology tycoons.

POLITICS

Hillary Clinton
New York senator, presidential contender, secretary of state

Sonia Gandhi
President of the Indian National Congress Party and dynastic head

Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf
President of Liberia and first African female head of state

Angela Merkel
Chancellor of Germany and former chair of the G8

Aung San Suu Kyi
Burmese politician and former political prisoner

. . .
BUSINESS

Indra Nooyi
Chairman/chief executive of PepsiCo

Dame Anita Roddick (d)
Founder of The Body Shop, entrepreneur and ethical campaigner

Sherron Watkins
Former Enron vice-president turned whistleblower

Meg Whitman
Former chief executive of Ebay who blazed a trail for e-commerce

Hu Xiaolian
Deputy governor of the People’s Bank of China. Responsible for renminbi internationalisation

. . .
ART

Louise Bourgeois (d)
French-American artist and sculptor known for her spider structures

Marlene Dumas
South African artist who specialises in representations of the human body

Tracey Emin
Young British artist who makes art out of her personal history

Annette de la Renta
Vice-chairman, Metropolitan Museum, New York

Marian Goodman
New York gallerist bringing European art to Americans

. . .
SCIENCE

Elizabeth Blackburn
Won 2009 Nobel prize for work on ageing and cancer

Jocelyn Bell Burnell
Astrophysicist who discovered the first pulsar (rotating neutron star)

Dame Jane Goodall
Groundbreaking primatologist and chimpanzee champion

Susan Greenfield
Britain’s most controversial female scientist

Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard
Nobel prize-winner for her work on embryonic development

. . .
SPORT

Yelena Isinbayeva
Russian pole-vaulter who won Olympic golds in 2004 and 2008

Paula Radcliffe
Long-distance runner who has won eight marathons

Annika Sörenstam
Holds more tournament titles than any other female golfer

Marta Vieira da Silva
Star football forward on Brazil’s national team

Serena Williams
Tennis champion with 27 Grand Slam wins and two Olympic golds

. . .
ENTERTAINMENT

Beyoncé
Moved from girl group to soloist, picking up 16 Grammys en route

Tina Fey
American actress, comic and Sarah Palin-impersonator

Jade Goody (d)
Icon of reality television

Angelina Jolie
One Oscar, three Golden Globes, massive Hollywood clout

Hannah Montana
Tween idol and model of media distribution

. . .
TECHNOLOGY

Carol Bartz
Outspoken Yahoo CEO who has sat on Intel and Cisco boards

Carly Fiorina
Head of Hewlett-Packard, 1999-2005

Marissa Mayer
The youngest member of Google’s executive committee

Sheryl Sandberg
Number two at Facebook is Zuckerberg’s closest business confidante

Padmasree Warrior
Chief technology officer and probable heir apparent at Cisco

. . .
BOOKS

Michiko Kakutani
Pulitzer prize-winning critic for The New York Times

Hilary Mantel
Queen of historical fiction. Winner of the 2009 Man Booker prize

Stephenie Meyer
Bestselling author of the Twilight vampire romance series

Gail Rebuck
Chairman and chief executive of the Random House Group

J. K. Rowling
Revolutionised children’s literature with Harry Potter

. . .
ZEITGEIST

Neda Agha-Soltan (d)
Iranian student killed in post-election protests in 2009

Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Activist and author who criticised Islam in her 2006 memoir Infidel

Zaha Hadid
The world’s most successful female architect

Kate Middleton
Now the official royal bride-in-waiting after years of expectation

Sarah Palin
Darling of the US Tea Party, scourge of the left and 2012 contender

. . .
FASHION

Michelle Obama
First lady and fashion role model

Sarah Jessica Parker
Starred in Sex and the City – and changed the shoe industry

Phoebe Philo
Céline’s creative director defined the current drive for minimalism

Kate Moss
The ultimate mirror of fashion’s obsessions and model-as-brand

Anna Wintour
Editor of US Vogue. Arguably fashion’s most influential woman

Nominated by: Rosie Blau, Clive Cookson, James Crabtree, Jan Dalley, Vanessa Friedman, David Gelles, Andrew Hill, Simon Kuper, Joseph Menn, Chris Nuttall, Rebecca Rose, Alec Russell, Richard Waters and FT Weekend Magazine staff

Group Sets Goal to Get More Women on Boards

December 10, 2010
Group Sets Goal to Get More Women on Boards
By JULIA WERDIGIER

LONDON — When Helena Morrissey, chief executive of the money manager Newton, brought home an industry award for “Most Influential Woman in Asset Management” in October, her 5-year-old son asked whether there was a similar category for men. There was not.

“It showed we’re just not there yet when it comes to gender equality,” Mrs. Morrissey said.

That is why she set up an initiative last month, backed by the chairmen at the Lloyds Banking Group, HSBC, the retailer J Sainsbury and other companies, to elevate more women to management boards. The chairmen pledged to spread the word among senior executives about the need for more diversity on boards in Britain, many of which had never had a female director.

The goal is to raise the number of women on boards to about a third by 2015 — without resorting to the quotas that are now law in Norway and France and are being phased in by Spain.

At the 100 largest publicly traded companies in Britain, 12.5 percent of directors were women this year, compared with 12.2 percent last year and 12 percent the year before, according to a study by the Cranfield School of Management, which referred to “a situation of stagnation.” About one in four companies still have exclusively male boards, including the energy provider International Power and the retailer Associated British Foods.

“The initiative is a third way between doing nothing and introducing a quota,” Mrs. Morrissey said, conceding that the 30 percent goal was ambitious. “We want to get there with momentum instead of regulation.”

Like the British government, Mrs. Morrissey says she believes that introducing a quota should be a last resort, preferring to focus on merit. She also said a quota was undesirable because it could create the perception of discrimination.

Theresa M. May, the British home secretary, indicated in a speech last month that improving equality should be more up to the individual and less to regulation. She also suggested using the concept of “fairness” rather than “equality,” which she said had become a “dirty word” and was “seen by a lot of people as something that is available to others, and not to them.”

Mrs. Morrissey’s initiative, named the 30% Club, seems well timed. The financial crisis had exposed the shortcomings and weaknesses of management boards and made chairmen ponder whether a more diverse board might lead to better decision-making. A new British corporate governance code that took effect in June, partly to help avoid another banking crisis, says that boards should be “well balanced,” with gender diversity, to avoid “group think.”

Prime Minister David Cameron picked gender equality as a priority when he took office in May. As a first step, he commissioned a report on what the government could do to increase the number of women on boards, something he says he believes would increase productivity. The findings are to be published in February.

Ruth Sealy, deputy director of the International Center for Women Leaders at the Cranfield School of Management, also noticed “the momentum is gathering in Britain.”

“People have been talking about this for a long time, but the noise and the seniority of people who joined the discussion has increased,” Ms. Sealy said.

Richard Emerton, managing director at the recruitment advisory company Korn/Ferry International in London, said he had “a surprising number of requests from chairmen today for lists of and introductions to possible female candidates.”

“The debate is now moving from purely technical skills to finding people that can help improve the boardroom dynamic,” Mr. Emerton said.

But many companies continue to hold on to strict criteria for board candidates, limiting the number of female candidates, Mr. Emerton said. It is a custom in Britain, for example, to hire only nonexecutive directors who already have a board seat somewhere else. Edward Davey, minister for employment relations, said the government might have to persuade chairmen to be less specific.

Mrs. Morrissey dismissed the notion that there were not enough suitable female candidates. At Newton, an asset management firm owned by Bank of New York Mellon, 26 percent of the senior work force is women, partly because the firm has tried to draw a broader list of job candidates and women have been attracted to working at a place with a female chief executive. Part of Newton’s strategy is to check whether companies it wants to invest in have a well-balanced management board.

However, Mrs. Morrissey said that more needed to be done to deepen the pool of candidates. She mentioned the need for senior executives to mentor more female employees and special career advisers who help women before and after maternity leave.

Mrs. Morrissey recalled how women would drop by her desk and say, “I’m concerned, I want a child, but how do I balance it?”

“They look ahead in their career and don’t like what they see culturally,” she said. “But the more women there are, the more appealing the image will become.”

Mrs. Morrissey, 44, knows what she is talking about. When she is not in charge at Newton, with about $70 billion of assets under management, she is spending time with her children and husband, Richard, who quit his job as a journalist to take care of their six daughters and three sons.

Mrs. Morrissey, who studied philosophy at Cambridge University, was not always an ambitious campaigner for greater gender diversity. She joined Newton in 1994 after the founder, Stewart Newton, noticed her talent as a bond analyst for Schroders in New York. When Bank of New York Mellon bought Newton eight years later, the new organization decided to improve equality and Mrs. Morrissey was asked to set up a women’s group.

“I slightly resisted because I felt I didn’t need that focus,” she said. “But you need to be mindful that developments in this area go in fits and starts, and I look at my daughters and see that their expectations are pretty high.”

Mrs. Morrissey said the support of male executives for her initiative was crucial. “A lot of these initiatives are just women talking to women,” she said. In fact, her own idea for the 30% Club came after a women-only lunch at Goldman Sachs last year, and the club’s other leaders include senior female executives from Rothschild, Deutsche Bank, KPMG and others.

“It is essential that senior male executives spread the word about the importance of gender balance on boards,” Mrs. Morrissey said.

Win Bischoff, the chairman of Lloyds, said the word was spreading already. “Several people approached me since I joined the initiative saying they are interested and want to join as well,” Mr. Bischoff said.

The biggest challenge for the 30% Club, Mrs. Morrissey said, was to keep up the momentum.

“The time is right and the door is ajar,” she said. “The main danger with initiatives is that they tend to fizzle out.”

Kochhar optimistic about women in business

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Kochhar optimistic about women in business

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Dec 7 2010 Chanda Kochhar, managing director and chief executive of India's ICICI Bank, speaks to James Lamont, the FT's south Asia bureau chief, about the challenges she has faced in her career and the changing role of women in business in emerging markets (5m 14sec)

The Women Who Would Be Ms. Palin

THE FEMALE FACTOR
The Women Who Would Be Ms. Palin
By LUISITA LOPEZ TORREGROSA
Published: November 23, 2010

NEW YORK — For a while this summer and autumn, pundits and pollsters (and wishful thinkers) believed that the U.S. midterm elections might bring forth a new “year of the woman.”

Looking at the droves of female Republican and Democratic candidates who came out to run in primaries for the House of Representatives and Senate — including marquee millionaire brand names like Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman, both Republican — it seemed easy to see a record-breaking year for women shaping up. Maybe women would score a coup as they did in 1992, when a dozen or so new Democratic, pro-abortion-rights women like Patty Murray and Barbara Boxer swept into the House and Senate.

But it didn’t happen in 2010, and now much has been made of that failure. At a glance, the numbers are discouraging to those who believe women should pull equal, or at least somewhere close. The number of women in Congress will stay at the same level as it is currently when the incoming class is sworn in in January: a total of 90, with 17 in the 100-member Senate and 73 in the 435-seat House.

Given those low percentages for women — despite the fact that female registered voters outnumber male — female activists may well throw up their hands.

There is, however, an interesting twist. The 112th Congress will have a record number of eight new Republican women, including Washington State’s first female Hispanic representative, Jaime Herrera. These women are different from established female Republican officeholders like Senators Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas and Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine. And they are different from most of the Democratic women on Capitol Hill, who outnumber them.

Besides that fresh crop of Republican women in Congress, a fistful of female Republican candidates made electoral history three weeks ago by winning hard-fought races for governor in South Carolina, New Mexico and Oklahoma. Nikki Haley became South Carolina’s first female governor and the country’s second Indian-American governor (with Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, a fellow Republican). Susanna Martinez became New Mexico’s first female governor and the first Latina governor anywhere in the United States. And Mary Fallin became Oklahoma’s first female governor.

The Republican women in Congress most clearly embody, and project, a new breed of political woman from the party: media-savvy and youthful, brash and bizarre, outspoken and flashy.

They are Sarah Palin’s political offspring. In the summer, they were famously the “mama grizzlies” of Ms. Palin’s video, coming off as ferociously protecting their cubs (American values, in Ms. Palin’s parlance) and scratching the eyes of anyone who dared attack them.

Now, in the mellowing afterglow of victory, they really don’t seem quite so fierce, favoring the seductive smile and the soft voice. They are camera-happy and quite unwilling to sit back for years waiting for seniority.

Leading the way is Michele Bachmann, not exactly a newbie since she has been serving in the House since 2007, representing a district in Minnesota. But Ms. Bachmann, who is prone to foot-in-mouth blather, is a sort of model (good and bad) for Republican congresswomen.

For one thing, voters and the news media pay attention to her. With hardly a piece of legislation to boast about, Ms. Bachmann has become a highly visible banner-carrier for the Tea Party movement. Fortified by the electoral success of Tea Party candidates on Nov. 2, she thrust herself forward to campaign for a spot in the House leadership come January. The prospective speaker, John A. Boehner, was not pleased, and other senior Republicans were aghast. Her survival instinct alive, Ms. Bachmann backed out.

But the newly elected Representative Kristi Noem, who defeated a Democratic incumbent, Stephanie Herseth Sandlin, to win South Dakota’s sole congressional seat, did get a seat at the high table. Last week, during orientation week on Capitol Hill, Ms. Noem was chosen by Mr. Boehner for the newly created freshman leadership post. Soon, she was giving her first impromptu news conference. Ms. Noem, a wife, mother, farmer, rancher, small-business owner and hunter, is drawing inevitable comparisons to Ms. Palin.

For the ex-governor of Alaska is the model. Despite some flops — notably in her home state, where Lisa Murkowski has claimed victory in the contentious battle to keep her Senate seat against Ms. Palin’s favored (male) candidate, Joe Miller — Ms. Palin proved she could be a key patron.

Many of the conservative Republican women who have skyrocketed into America’s consciousness lately are compared to Ms. Palin — outspoken, ambitious, attractive.

Ms. Haley, the governor-elect of South Carolina, owes Ms. Palin big time. When few voters and pundits were paying attention to this relatively obscure Indian-American in a state not known for diversity in politics, Ms. Palin zoomed in, gave her a public endorsement that Tea Party enthusiasts embraced and helped her become a national figure.

It is no surprise that Ms. Palin has brought forth a new breed of female Republican politician.

As a leader in a post-feminist generation, she has set the agenda, and the pace. She has shaped a campaign strategy that follows no clear model. She dominates all media platforms all the time.

Nate Silver, a political statistician who writes the FiveThirtyEight blog for The New York Times, of which the International Herald Tribune is the global edition, calculated that Ms. Palin draws as much search traffic worldwide as Barack Obama. “If and when Ms. Palin declares her candidacy for the White House,” Mr. Silver wrote on Nov. 19, “it could consume much of the media oxygen literally for months.”

But she seems to be doing that already. And, in her wake, the new breed of Republican women hopes to follow suit.

Judy Dempsey on why NATO and the E.U. cannot work together.

Cherie Blair on women's financing

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WOMEN AT THE TOP from WORLD
Cherie Blair on women's financing

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Nov 17 2010 Cherie Blair, founder of the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women, tells the FT's Richard Edgar that more must be done to provide women across the world with access to capital, a problem exacerbated, she says, by the inability of many women to own titled land. (6m 23sec)

Related Links:
Women at the Top

Credits:
Produced by Robert Orr. Filmed by Marc Taylor

Lagarde speaks out on female quotas

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WOMEN AT THE TOP from WORLD
Lagarde speaks out on female quotas

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Nov 16 2010 Christine Lagarde, French finance minister, tells Lionel Barber, FT editor, why she has changed her mind on female quotas and now believes that a system to help women move into senior roles is a necessary evil in today's male-dominated boardrooms and political arenas. (5m 51sec)

Related Links:
Special Report: Women at the Top

Credits:
Produced by Seb Morton-Clark, filmed by Marc Taylor

Plenty of Suits and Ties at Annual Women’s Business Forum

FEMALE FACTOR
Plenty of Suits and Ties at Annual Women’s Business Forum
By KATRIN BENNHOLD
Published: October 17, 2010

DEAUVILLE, FRANCE — The stars of this year’s women’s forum were the men.

As female business and political leaders gathered in this beach resort in Normandy last week for the Women’s Forum Global Meeting, an annual conclave that has been dubbed the Davos of women, the number of suits and ties in a sea of colorful female elegance definitely stood out.

Maurice Lévy, chief executive of the advertising company Publicis; Carlos Ghosn, the chief of the carmakers Renault and Nissan; and James Turley, global head of the accounting firm Ernst & Young, were among those who took to the stage to plead the case for more women throughout corporate hierarchies.

Twenty-three chieftains of industry — 13 of them men — committed to six concrete measures to improve the gender balance in their companies over the next 12 months. The measures included pledges to make the advancement of women a top strategic priority at the chief executive level, to require female candidates in every recruitment pool, and to deliver specific targets for more female representation at all levels of their companies.

“This is strategically as important to our businesses as revenue growth or product innovation,” said Mr. Turley, one of the drivers of the initiative. “We need women if we want to remain competitive.”

And women, observed Melanne Verveer, U.S. ambassador-at-large for global women’s issues and a regular at Deauville, “need men to be their ambassadors.”

The greater presence of men at this year’s forum — the sixth such session since it was first held in 2005 — is emblematic not just of a growing awareness in the business world that looming skills shortages make women a vital pool of talent. It is also indicative of a shift among prominent women toward the idea that men — as sympathetic chief executives, corporate mentors and involved fathers — are crucial to the next stage of women’s advancement.

Multinationals like the nuclear giant Areva and the food service company Sodexo have appointed men as diversity officers in order, they say, to communicate more effectively to the male executives running operational units that they should or must promote women.

And European governments are increasingly looking at policies that might nudge fathers to share responsibilities in the family to help relieve the pressure on working mothers.

“We need role models” not just of women in senior positions but of senior men making more time for the family, said Aart de Geus, deputy secretary general of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Chris Viehbacher, chief executive of Sanofi-Aventis, the pharmaceutical company, suggested businesses help alleviate childcare worries of employees by providing nurseries at the corporate level. “What you really want to do is create circumstances in which men and women can do it all,” he said.

Meanwhile, Michel Landel, head of Sodexo, stressed the importance of a visible and audible commitment at the chief executive level: “It’s a man’s world, and companies have been shaped by men,” he said.

Or as Mr. Turley put it: “In some cases, we are fighting literally centuries of tradition.”

But if there was broad agreement on the need for more concerted action, the views among both women and men here often diverged on the methods. One of the most divisive issues remains that of quotas for women in corporate boardrooms, a major talking point now that a number of European countries are weighing or have passed legislation obliging companies to have a minimum share of female directors.

“I hate quotas,” said Mr. Lévy of Publicis. He said his own company has seven women on its 15-member board, simply because those women were the best candidates. But he conceded that the threat of legislation in France was what had recently impelled the mostly male chief executives of the industry association he heads to adopt a code of good practice committing them to a minimum share of women on boards.

Mr. Landel, by contrast, insisted that without enforceable quotas the numbers would simply not budge. “You need quotas,” he said. “Unless you take very, very aggressive steps, things will not change.”

Viviane Reding, a vice president of the European Commission and the commissioner for justice, told companies that if they wanted to avoid regulation they would have to move quickly in promoting more women.

Threatening Europe-wide quotas as soon as late 2011 — a move that would have to be agreed to by member governments — she said business had “one more chance.”

Ms. Reding, who as telecommunications commissioner responded to a failed effort at self-regulation by the mobile phone industry with rules that forced European roaming charges down by more than half, has convened a chief executive summit in the spring of next year to hear from business leaders on how they plan to address gender balance in their organizations voluntarily.

“They had better get it done,” she said.

Women are the rising stars in the new China

FT Home > World > Asia-Pacific > China
Women are the rising stars in the new China
By Patti Waldmeir
Published: October 13 2010 15:58 | Last updated: October 13 2010 15:58

Less than a century ago, many Chinese women had their feet broken and bound so tightly they could scarcely walk. Now the world’s three richest self-made women are from China, and 11 out of 20 global female billionaires are Chinese.

In many ways, they have communism to thank. Mao Zedong set out to make China a global model of gender equality, and although he failed at so much else, he largely succeeded in transforming Chinese society into a world where women think they are at least equal to men – and many men seem to agree.

“Mao said, ‘Women hold up half the sky,’” says Rupert Hoogewerf, founder of the China Rich List, which earlier this week published a ranking of the world’s wealthiest self-made women. He placed Cheung Yan (Zhang Yin), the Chinese head of Nine Dragons Paper, a recycled-paper company, at number one with a personal fortune of $5.6bn.

“The single most positive legacy [of communism in China] was the emancipation of women,” write Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn in their book Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide. “A century ago, China was arguably the worst place in the world to be born female,” they write. But as Mr Hoogewerf says, “then Mao unbound their feet”.

He identifies complex political, social, cultural and economic reasons that made a scrap-paper entrepreneur from China richer than Oprah Winfrey or the doyennes of Zara, Gap, Benetton and Ebay. But much of it has to do with children – or the lack of them – and Chinese women’s profoundly different attitude to childcare.

“In the west and Japan, after marriage women stay at home to look after the kids, but in modern China it’s not like that,” says Wang Jiafen, head of the Shanghai Women Entrepreneurs’ Association.

“Women will not stay at home to look after children. Chinese women do not want to stop their career just to be a housewife,” she says.

Ms Wang, 60, is now a jet-setting venture capitalist, having retired from a job heading one of China’s biggest state-owned dairies. “In China, most women think it’s boring to stay at home: they don’t have anything to do,” she says.

Many western women might privately agree with Ms Wang, but few would pronounce it so publicly. But in China “there is no social stigma” to such attitudes, says Nandani Lynton of the China Europe International Business School in Shanghai, who has spent 17 years in China.

“Mao made an incredible difference when he said women hold up half the sky, since then it has been assumed that all women in China will work,” she says. Easy availability of childcare helps: there is a tradition of grandparents caring for grandchildren, and Beijing’s one-child policy has meant grandparents look after every child – an impossible dream for working women in the west.

Yin Xinyu, vice-president at Shanghai Rural Commercial Bank, has three nannies, help from her parents and a tutor for her daughter in primary school. “So I don’t need to stay at home”, she says.

But Prof Lynton says the availability of childcare – whether grandparents or childcare centres popularised under communism – is only half of it. “It’s also very much an issue of what is acceptable,” she says. “Chinese women have no role model for guilt, because even before the revolution, everyone who could afford it had an ayi [nanny or maid]”. Traditional Chinese culture does not stress the importance of early childhood development, so many Chinese women do not feel guilty missing their children’s formative years, she adds.

Ms Yin, the banker, says women these days can choose between staying at home or working. “For the older generation, staying at home meant failure, but for my generation, staying at home is a personal choice,” she says. “Many of my friends stay at home and I envy them.”

But when women choose the workplace, they often prove highly ambitious. According to a recent study from the Center for Work-Life Policy in New York, 76 per cent of women in China aspire to top jobs, compared with only 52 per cent in the US. Working mothers in China “are able to aim high, in part, because they have more shoulders to lean on than their American and European peers when it comes to childcare”, the centre notes. With an average work week of 71 hours, the country’s mothers would not cope without abundant cheap childcare.

Two other factors contribute to the astonishing success of female entrepreneurs in China, says Mr Hoogewerf: one is the Cultural Revolution (think Mao’s “Iron Girls” in their androgynous outfits), and the other is economic.

Ms Wang says China’s rising economy has lifted all boats, but those with females at the helm have fared better. “A thousand years ago, only men could compete with each other, but in the economic war, you need intelligence instead of just physical strength. China’s strong economic growth has created more opportunities for women.”

Ms Yin has an even more intriguing explanation for the success of girls: schoolteachers in China reward compliant children, and girls make more obedient students. “Girls are always being praised in school, and they gain confidence that way,” she says, noting “confidence is very important for an entrepreneur”.

In spite of these factors, China has not yet found the formula for perfect gender equality. In many rural areas, boys are still preferred to girls, leading to high levels of illegal (but still common) gender-selective abortion. In traditional Chinese society, sons are obliged to care for elderly parents, and their wives are expected to care for in-laws – not birth parents. In a society with a minimal social safety net for the elderly, this has led to a strong preference for sons in more traditional areas.

But urbanisation has significantly eroded that trend too, with many urban families saying they prefer girls because they remain to care for the elderly that males may shirk – and increasingly because they are cheaper to raise than boys, who are expected to provide a home upon marriage, a crippling burden given high property prices.

Echoing a common complaint of women all over the world, Ms Yin says equality in the workplace comes only after women have proved they are not just equal to men, but better. “Women need to be twice as good to get the same job,” she says, although she stresses her career has not suffered due to gender discrimination.

Will the world’s rich lists still be dominated by the Chinese in a decade or two? Ironically, wealth may lead to fewer women in the workplace: women who do not need to work may choose to stay home and, according to Prof Lynton, rich Chinese men increasingly want trophy wives who do not work. But foot binding is not coming back any time soon: gender equality is a legacy of communism that appears to be here to stay.

Additional reporting by Shirley Chen in Shanghai

Stop Stereotyping Female Leaders

Blogs - The Conversation
Stop Stereotyping Female Leaders
8:09 AM Monday October 11, 2010
by Athena Vongalis-Macrow and Andrea Gallant

Women's leadership programs are charged with imagining a new type of woman leader for whom leadership is an attainable aspiration. But effective leadership education for women is still a haven for bad practices that send mixed messages to aspiring leaders. There are two types of practices that work to stereotype women in leadership:

First, programs rely on bringing out the superwoman as a model of leadership. On the final day of our leadership program, a woman was invited to present her tips for getting ahead to a group of aspirational young female leaders. She was in her mid-forties, a professor and dean of a business faculty, and had just given birth to twins through IVF. She was immaculately put together, on stilettos all day. Can we do all that? Why do so many women's leadership programs send out this unrealistic and exhausting message? There is a lack of women leaders as role models, but sustaining stereotypes of the superwoman is no solution. For role models to be effective, they need to be both inspirational and motivational. Consider the context of aspiring women leaders, who dismiss the idea that work is your entire life and a woman needs to go it alone and to have it all. The superwoman is not affirming of choices and balance. She continues to perpetuate the traditional notion that doing leadership about getting control, dominance, and power, at all costs. Instead, leadership programs need to increase the repertoire of role models so leadership is feasible, flexible, and appealing at all stages of a career. Such role models could be better fostered from our networks and our exemplary peers, rather than from exaggerated tokens of women's leadership.

Second, programs focus on the common narratives about the woes of women in leadership. Glass ceilings, the double binds of family and work, and discriminatory nature of organizations reinforce ideas that women are vulnerable and need fixing. Women need a better way to use the language of self-promotion and accountability. We know that language creates the reality of how individuals see themselves. So, while leadership language for women still focuses on barriers and struggles, this practice maintains the backlash avoidance model of success, which suggests that women fear negative repercussions from self promotion and standing out. It is no wonder that women can often negotiate a better deal for others than they can for themselves. Compare this language context to that of male leadership programs which are littered with the narratives of success. Males learn to take charge, tackle challenges, develop talent, driving innovation and guide change. Disrupting the stereotypical use of language should be a focus of women's leadership programs.

Women's leadership programs are necessary to accelerate women's leadership aspirations. But just having a women's leadership program isn't enough. If it's not done right, women can't move forward. Effective programs for tomorrow's leaders should disrupt stereotyping.

Athena Vongalis-Macrow and Andrea Gallant are academic researchers working in education and leadership at Deakin University, Melbourne Australia. Presently they are writing a book, Glass Wall Barriers. They can be contacted at info@glasswalls.com.au.

The 10,000 Women initiative by Goldman Sachs

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Investing in women is one of the most effective ways to reduce inequality and facilitate inclusive economic growth. Investing in education for women has a significant multiplier effect, leading to more productive workers, healthier and better-educated families, and ultimately to more prosperous communities.

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These pragmatic, short-term programs help to open doors for women who would not otherwise have access to a business education. Students are offered mentoring and post-graduation support by partner institutions, local businesses and the people of Goldman Sachs.

The initiative is designed to foster greater shared economic growth and is based on research which found that investing in girls and women yields significant economic growth.

The funding for the 10,000 Women initiative is provided through The Goldman Sachs Foundation.

Why Men Still Get More Promotions Than Women

September 2010
Why Men Still Get More Promotions Than Women
by Herminia Ibarra, Nancy M. Carter, and Christine Silva

Listen to an interview with the author of this article.


Nathalie (all names in this article are disguised), a senior marketing manager at a multinational consumer goods company and a contender for chairman in her country, was advised by her boss to raise her profile locally. An excellent intracompany network wouldn’t be enough to land her the new role, he told her; she must also become active in events and associations in her region. Recently matched with a high-level mentor through a companywide program, she had barely completed the lengthy prework assigned for that when she received an invitation to an exclusive executive-training program for high potentials—for which she was asked to fill out more self-assessments and career-planning documents. “I’d been here for 12 years, and nothing happened,” observes Nathalie. “Now I am being mentored to death.”

Amy, a midlevel sales manager for the same firm, struggles with a similar problem: “My mentor’s idea of a development plan is how many external and internal meetings I can get exposure to, what presentations I can go to and deliver, and what meetings I can travel to,” she says. “I just hate these things that add work. I hate to say it, but I am so busy. I have three kids. On top of that, what my current boss really wants me to do is to focus on ‘breakthrough thinking,’ and I agree. I am going to be in a wheelchair by the time I get to be vice president, because they are going to drill me into the ground with all these extra-credit projects.”

With turnover sky-high in the company’s fast-growing Chinese market, Julie, a much-valued finance manager with growth potential, has likewise undergone intensive mentoring—and she worries that she may be getting caught betwixt and between. When she was nominated for a high-potential program, her boss complained that the corporate team was interfering with the mentoring operation he was already running in the region. Julie also took part in a less formal scheme pairing junior and senior finance leaders. “I’d prefer to be involved in the corporate program because it is more high-profile,” says Julie, “but it all adds up to a lot of mentoring.”

Nathalie, Amy, and Julie are not atypical. As companies continue to see their pipelines leak at mid-to-senior levels even though they’ve invested considerable time and resources in mentors and developmental opportunities, they are actively searching for ways to retain their best female talent. In a 2010 World Economic Forum report on corporate practices for gender diversity in 20 countries, 59% of the companies surveyed say they offer internally led mentoring and networking programs, and 28% say they have women-specific programs. But does all this effort translate into actual promotions and appointments for both sexes?

The numbers suggest not. A 2008 Catalyst survey of more than 4,000 full-time-employed men and women—high potentials who graduated from top MBA programs worldwide from 1996 to 2007—shows that the women are paid $4,600 less in their first post-MBA jobs, occupy lower-level management positions, and have significantly less career satisfaction than their male counterparts with the same education. That’s also the case when we take into account factors such as their industry, prior work experience, aspirations, and whether they have children. (For more findings, see Nancy M. Carter and Christine Silva, “Women in Management: Delusions of Progress,” HBR March 2010.) Yet among that same group, more women than men report having mentors. If the women are being mentored so thoroughly, why aren’t they moving into higher management positions?

To better understand what is going on, we conducted in-depth interviews with 40 high-potential men and women (including Nathalie, Amy, and Julie) who were selected by their large multinational company to participate in its high-level mentoring program. We asked about the hurdles they’ve faced as they’ve moved into more-senior roles, as well as what kinds of help and support they’ve received for their transitions. We also analyzed the 2008 survey to uncover any differences in how men and women are mentored and in the effects of their mentoring on advancement. Last, we compared those data with the results of a 2010 survey of the same population, in which we asked participants to report on promotions and lateral moves since 2008.

All mentoring is not created equal, we discovered. There is a special kind of relationship—called sponsorship—in which the mentor goes beyond giving feedback and advice and uses his or her influence with senior executives to advocate for the mentee. Our interviews and surveys alike suggest that high-potential women are overmentored and undersponsored relative to their male peers—and that they are not advancing in their organizations. Furthermore, without sponsorship, women not only are less likely than men to be appointed to top roles but may also be more reluctant to go for them.

Herminia Ibarra (herminia.ibarra@insead.edu) is a professor of organizational behavior and the Cora Chaired Professor of Leadership and Learning at Insead in Fontainebleau, France, and the author of Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career (Harvard Business Review Press, 2003).

Nancy M. Carter (ncarter@catalyst.org) is the vice president of research at Catalyst, a New York–based nonprofit that works with businesses to expand opportunities for women; she is also a visiting scholar at Insead.

Christine Silva (csilva@catalyst.org) is a director of research at Catalyst.