Asia beats the West for women in business
AFP , HONG KONG
Monday, May 09, 2005,Page 9
TV executive Michelle Guthrie is adamant she wouldn't have got the high-flying promotions she's had in Asia if she were living in her native Australia.
"It's a different world here -- the opportunities for women are so much better than in the West," Guthrie said. "There is extraordinary disregard for gender here."
The chief executive of STAR satellite TV, one of the region's largest television companies, Guthrie commands a station watched by 100 million people every day in 35 countries.
She is one of a growing number of female executives from Islamic Bangladesh to Confucian China to majority Hindu India who have managed to rise above cultural obstacles that carve strict roles for women to get ahead in business.
"I really feel like I am suppressed when I go to Europe, there is much more chauvenism there," Guthrie said.
According to research by Hong Kong Baptist University professor of management, Anne Marie Francesco, Asia's female executives are not only beating the men, more importantly they are doing so on their own terms.
"In the West there is a tendency for businesswomen to emulate their male counterparts, co-opting their management styles," Francesco says. "But in Asia women are running corporations in their own feminine way."
Cecile Bonnefond, president of venerable French champagne house Veuve Clicquot, the sponsor of worldwide businesswomen's awards for 33 years, agrees, saying she has been especially impressed by the attitudes of Chinese businesswomen.
"We know there are a lot of Chinese entrepreneurs who are women -- who are young and tough," Bonnefond says. "They are not afraid of anything. They are fearless. They just go, run and get on with it."
The reasons for such differences are manifold but mostly cultural, says Francesco, an American academic.
"Much of it comes down to views of women's roles," she says. "Asia has more traditional views of a woman's role; she should provide and be a good mother to the family. But it's in the way it is applied that the difference is found."
She points, for example, to survey research that show Asians welcome women working long hours because it implies they are trying hard to provide for the family.
"Whereas in the West women who work long hours are viewed as being indulgent and pursuing their own selfish goals; that they are not providing," Francesco says.
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