Women and the workplace

Even as Western Europe and the US struggle to emerge from the global recession, China and India are surging ahead. China is projected to become the world’s largest economy within the next decade; India could leapfrog Japan into third place in individual country GDP rankings as early as 2012. One of the chief engines of these explosive economies: educated women.

Educated women are pouring into the professional workforce in China and India, with profound implications for national and multinational corporations. Yet even as employers rely on this growing cadre of “white-collar” women, many have little understanding of the complicated career dynamics of this rich tranche of talent. Misconceptions abound, from cultural cartoons to western wannabes.

The ambitions of female talent in the top two emerging markets and the challenges they encounter are complex, fundamentally different from their western counterparts and significantly nuanced, according to a recent study from the New York-based Centre for Work-Life Policy (published in the Harvard Business Review). To begin with, despite many similarities, accomplished women in China and India are not interchangeable.

Chinese and Indian women demonstrate stratospheric levels of aspiration…

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