Women in the workplace

Even in today’s developed world, surveys show that parents still prefer to have a boy rather than a girl and this is particularly true in Asian countries. Boys have been seen as a greater blessing for the longstanding reason that they are expected to become better economic providers for their parents’ old age. Yet parents have to think again. Among the various economic driving forces, the Internet and the rise of China and India, the role of women in economic growth has long been overlooked.

Girls get better grades at school than boys, and in most developed countries more women than men go to university. Women will thus be better equipped for the new jobs of the 21st century, in which brains count a lot more than brawn. In Britain far more women than men are now training to become doctors. In Hong Kong, an increasing number of elites admitted by the top Medical, Law and Business Schools are women. A surveys show that women consistently achieve higher financial returns than men do. Furthermore, the increase in female employment in the rich world has been the main driving force of growth in the past couple of decades. Those women have contributed more to global GDP growth than have either new technology or the new giants, China and India.

The rise of women as a key economic driving force can be attributed to better grades they get at schools. Why do boys lag behind in schools? It is not an easy question to answer. Some educators may lay blame for the current school system and claim that current schools stressing on disciplines and regulations are not designed for boys. Some may attribiute the failure of boys in schools to the popularity of computer games. I do buy the later idea. When I paid a visit to local toy shops, one common scene was a crowd of boys gathering around the X-box and Playstation demonstration booths. They played the trial computer games and badmouthed each other. No girls queued up for the trial games in all the toy shops I visited. Boys are so fascinated by computer games and they become addicted. Their ‘Electronic addiction’ comes at a price – their health, personal growth and their school grades.

When these boys grow up, they will find themselves a loser in the workplace when compared with their female counterparts. The traditional perception that men as the only bread-winner of the family has been deeply rooted in Asian society. The rise of women challenges the traditional social role of men in the family and this may be disastrous in Asian families in which male chauvinism is still prevalent. In Hong Kong , most family violence that hits the headlines stems from a jobless father who cannot accept the change of his social role in today’s world. Men have to be freed from the social role pre-imposed by our ancestral hunter-gatherer society. Instead of a bread-winner, men can also do a good job in child rearing. Fading male chauvinism, especially in Asian society, is a mammoth social and cultural engineering demanding determined effort from the government and NGOs.