【中文标题】想要统治世界的女人
【原文标题】The Women Who Want to Run the World
【登载媒体】新闻周刊
【原文作者】R. M. Schneiderman、Alexandra A. Seno
【原文链接】http://www.newsweek.com/2010/08/27/chinese-women-are-more-ambitious-than-americans.html
Gentech上海办公室中的员工。
想要了解女性在中国不断变化的角色，只要看看一本格外走红的小说《杜拉拉升职记》就好了。故事讲述了一位虚构的杜小姐在公司内部晋升的经历。这本书在中国图书销量榜上停留了141周，它派生出两本续集、一部票房收入极高的电影，以及一部网络连续剧，自从8月中旬开播以来，浏览量已经超过1000万。一位书迷，28岁的刘丹慧在一家外国公司的市场部就职，她说他欣赏杜的坚持不懈，并认为“将来在中国，会有越来越多像她一样的女人出现”。实际上，像刘这样的拥趸非常多，这也是为什么像《杜拉拉升职记》这种描写雄心勃勃的年轻都市人心中的渴望和困惑的文学作品长盛不衰的原因。
在毛泽东提出“妇女顶起半边天”口号的几十年之后，杜拉拉及其同胞的成功揭示了中国女性一个令人好奇的现象：她们似乎比美国女性更有野心。根据纽约工作生活政策中心在年初的一项研究，只有三分之一的大学毕业美国女人认为自己很有野心，而中国的这个数字将近三分之二。而且，中国超过75％的女性渴望在公司担任高层职位，美国只有一半女性有这样的想法。中国有77％的女性参加工作，美国只有69％。
造成这种现象的其中一个原因，是中国的高速发展为两种性别的技术人员创造了许多新的机会。工作生活政策中心的高级副总裁Ripa Rashid说，快速发展“促成了狂欢的局面”，在这种文化和历史传统中，中国女性不仅仅被鼓励参加工作，她们自己也期望这样做。当这项研究的主导者关注不同的群体时，他们最经常听到的是，共产主义“总是强调女人可以做一切男人的事情”。实际上，在过去的几十年中，共产党政府为男女提供了平等的受教育机会。外交关系委员会的资深人士Isobel Coleman说：“毛的革命让社会遭受了巨大的创伤，但是的确增加了女性的力量。”
这滋生了一代自认为跻身中国精英行列的女性。在美国，这种转化是经过了几十年争取平等和女性权力的艰苦斗争才最终实现的。有些事情被认为是巨大的进步，比如，Madeleine Albright在90年代成为美国第一任女性国务卿。同样，Nancy Pelosi成为白宫发言人也被认为是一座里程碑。亚洲协会6月份在香港组织了一次女性领导力的会议，该协会的执行董事Judi Kilachand说，在中国，希望职业成功的女性绝少遇到制度性的障碍，因此女性领导人也屡见不鲜。最受人瞩目的女性公众形象是曾经负责中国经济开放改革的已退休副总理吴仪，她的背景是一名石油工程师，在政府内部的工作包括中国进入WTO的谈判。今天，中国国务院中女性的比例大大高于美国国会中女性的比例——21.3％。
在商业上层社会中，情况也是如此。税务咨询机构格兰特桑顿国际的研究发现，五分之四的中国公司在高层管理者岗位上有女性，这个数字在欧盟是二分之一，在美国是三分之二。同样，中国企业的高层管理人士中有31％是女性，美国只有20％。中国最有名的一位房地产大亨是张欣，她和她的丈夫掌控着SOHO房地产帝国。更有说服力的是，福布斯2010年富人排行榜中14位女性亿万富翁中，有半数来自中国大陆。现在，随着中国各地城市的高楼大厦如雨后春笋般林立，随着道路上逐渐塞满豪华汽车，女性更可以轻松地设想自己是这幅繁荣景色的一个组成部分。
另外一个区别是，美国的女性如果过分表达自己的事业抱负，经常会遭到指责。因为她们已经在平等和物质方面上了一个台阶，很多人就因此假设女性必须牺牲对事业的追求。例如，当希拉里克林顿角逐总统位置时，她被一些人贴上入主白宫的狂热份子的标签。英特尔公司多样化和包容性组织的Rosalind Hudnell说：“其实很多美国女性都有极大的野心，她们只不过羞于承认。”
另外一个因素：中国的女性在追求职业成功的同时，不用担心照看孩子的问题。在美国和西方大部分国家，很多女性与父母和亲戚不住在一起，在把孩子日托的同时上班，她们感到十分焦虑。因此很多情况下，有教育背景的母亲待在家中，或者转为低级别的岗位，以便照看孩子。在中国不是这样，集体和政府开办的幼儿托管所离工作地点很近，因此人们关注的重心就在于，是努力工作为孩子提供更好的生活条件，或者按工作生活中心的Rashid所说的“实用主义”？还是在别人照看自己孩子的时候有激烈的反对情绪？
总而言之，在这个世界上发展和变化最快速的国家中，野心是探索机会和挑战的最重要的一项技能。年轻的中国女性感受到实现野心的压力，不仅仅是为了迎合男人世界的标准，同时也是为了跟上房价每隔几年就翻一番、人们热衷于比较物质享受的社会的脚步。换句话说，在这个节奏快速的世界中，野心应当是必备的觉悟。没有野心的人，必定会被甩在后面。
原文：
Workers at the Shanghai offices of Gentech.
To understand the changing role of women in China, consider the runaway success of a novel titled Du Lala’s Rise. The story chronicles the adventures of the fictional Miss Du as she moves up the corporate ladder. The book spent 141 weeks on the Chinese bestseller list and spawned two sequels, one of this year’s top films at the box office, and an online drama series that has had more than 100 million page views since starting in mid-August. One fan, Liu Danhui, a 28-year-old with a marketing job at a foreign company, says she admires Du’s persistence and believes that “there will be more and more women like her in China in the future.” In fact, there are so many people like Liu that Du Lala’s Rise has left in its wake a thriving subgenre of Du-inspired literature portraying the aspirations and dilemmas of the country’s ambitious young urbanites.
Decades after Mao Zedong declared that “women hold up half the sky,” the success of Du Lala and her peers reflects a curious fact about women in China: they appear to be far more ambitious than their counterparts in the United States. According to a study completed earlier this year by the New York–based Center for Work-Life Policy, just over one third of all college-educated American women describe themselves as very ambitious. In China that figure is closer to two thirds. What’s more, over 75 percent of women in China aspire to hold a top corporate job, compared with just over half in the U.S., and 77 percent of Chinese women participate in the workforce, compared with 69 percent in the U.S.
One reason for this is that China is changing at such a blistering speed that new opportunities are becoming available to skilled workers of both genders. Ripa Rashid, a senior vice president at the Center for Work-Life Policy, says the rapid growth “creates this excitement,” and builds on a cultural and historical legacy in which Chinese women are not just encouraged to participate in the workforce, they are expected to. When the authors of the Work-Life study conducted focus groups, one of the things they frequently heard was that communism “always emphasized that women can do whatever men can do.” Indeed, for decades in China, the communist government has provided equal access to education. “Mao’s revolution inflicted enormous pain upon society,” says Isobel Coleman, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “But it did empower women.”
One result has been a generation of women and girls who believe they belong among China’s power elite. In the U.S., that shift followed decades of pitched battles over equality and women’s rights. It was considered a big deal, for instance, when Madeleine Albright became the first female secretary of state in 1990s. Likewise, Nancy Pelosi’s rise to become the speaker of the House was seen as monumental. In China, though, there are fewer institutional barriers for women trying to succeed professionally, says Judi Kilachand, an executive director at the Asia Society, which organized a conference on women in leadership in Hong Kong in June. Female leaders are therefore viewed as more common. One of the most familiar public figures responsible for the country’s economic openness is the now retired vice premier Wu Yi, who trained as a petroleum engineer before a career in government that included negotiating World Trade Organization admission for China. Today China has a greater percentage of women in its Parliament—21.3 percent—than the U.S. does in Congress.
That’s true, too, in the executive suite. Grant Thornton International, the tax consultancy, found that roughly eight out of 10 companies in China had wom-en in senior management roles, compared with approximately half in the European Union and two thirds in the U.S. Similarly, in China, 31 percent of top executives are female, compared with 20 percent in America. One of the most visible real-estate tycoons is Zhang Xin, who along with her husband controls the Sohu property empire. Tellingly, half of the 14 female billionaires on Forbes’s 2010 list of the world’s wealthiest people were from mainland China. So now, as cities throughout the country sprout new skyscrapers and roads clog up with luxury cars, it’s relatively easy for women to envision themselves as a key part of that picture of prosperity.
Part of the difference may also be that women in the U.S. are often stigmatized if they express considerable ambition. Because they have already achieved a certain level of equality and material success, the assumption, many say, is that women should sacrifice only so much in pursuit of their careers. When Hillary Clinton ran for president, for example, she was labeled by some as overly zealous to take the White House. “A lot of women in the U.S. are incredibly ambitious, but they are too embarrassed to admit it,” says Rosalind Hudnell, the head of diversity and inclusion at Intel Corp.
Another factor: women in China are aided in the pursuit of their careers by the fact that child care is easily accessible. In the U.S., as in much of the Western world, many women live far from parents and siblings, and feel enormous anxiety about working while sending children to day care. In many instances, educated mothers stay home or step off the corporate ladder to take care of their children. Not so in China. Collective and state-run day-care centers are located near workplaces, and the emphasis is on working to provide a good life for one’s child, or on what the Work-Life Center’s Rashid calls the “pragmatic aspects” of child care, versus the emotional response to allowing someone else to take care of one’s children.
On top of all that, ambition has become a critical survival skill in navigating the opportunities and challenges of living in a society that is growing and changing faster than perhaps any other country. Younger Chinese women are feeling the pressure to “make it”—not necessarily just by the measures of a man’s world, but to keep up in an environment where housing prices in major cities have doubled every few years and where competition for everything is rife. In other words, in this fast-paced world, ambition is seen as a matter of necessity. And those who don’t have it, the thinking goes, may ultimately get left behind. |
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发表于 2010-9-3 13:24
我终于看到一篇实事求是的文章了，热泪盈眶~！！！
