Nǐ hǎo Shanghai
Happily landed in Shanghai yesterday and am freshly back from the inaugural event of the Dell Women’s Entrepreneur Network – ‘Take Your Own Path Through Global Tech Strategies’ event held at the Glamour Bar at M on the Bund.
It’ll be a jam packed couple of days starting off with breakfast with Dell’s PH Ferrand in the morning but before I head to bed I thought I would jot down one interesting conversation I had about women in China. From 1949 women were treated equally under communism and you’re almost as likely to see a female doctor or engineer as you are a male one. The impact of the ‘one child’ policy means that women can go back to work much sooner than in other parts of the world where women take quite a few years out of full time work to look after kids. There is also a lot of family help around – that one child has four doting grandparents to help with the child rearing. I learned that it is written into the Chinese ‘constitution’ that women can breastfeed at work. but that with economic growth things are changing a bit. There is growing family pressure to get married, have a baby and quit working that didn’t exist before.
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I dutifully accepted my face paint (that’s me on the right with my producer Meg) while drinking a delicious cocktail (alcohol free I might add, though that’s no defence) and eating delicious Macadamia nuts (who knew South Africa exported these? I thought they came from Hawaii!). But when a similarly-face painted South African business leader reminds over his drink that a quarter of the country’s population is unemployed, I stop stuffing my face with nuts and put down the fruit cocktail. Last year alone around 1 million employed South Africans lost their jobs. With only around 15 million truly employable people, this is an incredible blow. Why is the government paying for my free drink whenthere are thousands closer to home that could use one much more than I could?
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