Winning the War for Talent in Emerging Markets. Sylvia Ann Hewlett
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Wolfe, Bloomberg's head of professional development, explains the situation: “Bloomberg is now in 146 countries and growing at a rapid pace. We have an urgent need to draw upon a deep pool of talent to deliver excellence.”
It's time to turn the spotlight on highly qualified women.
EDUCATED BRIC WOMEN: A NEW NARRATIVE
Why has it taken so long to notice them?
The main reason: despite an expanding body of work on women in emerging economies, few studies consider the potential of educated, ambitious women. Much of the existing research casts them in a narrative of victimhood. Books like the aforementioned Half the Sky and From Outrage to Courage by Anne Firth Murray, as well as highly publicized reports and initiatives from the United Nations and the World Bank, promulgate the notion that all women in developing countries are oppressed, their potential obscured by poverty and their presence relegated to the sidelines of male-dominated cultures.
Our research shows this to be untrue.
Just as in the United States and in other developed economies, women in emerging markets are enrolling in and graduating from universities and graduate schools at rates that match and often outstrip those of men. Furthermore, these women are highly ambitious; according to our surveys, nearly two-thirds of women in China and Russia and 85 percent of women in India consider themselves very ambitious—almost twice as many as in the United States. As opportunities undreamed of a generation ago open up in BRIC countries, one regional expert remarks, “Women no longer have to apologize for their ambition.”
Educated women from the BRIC countries who step out of the shadows of their less-fortunate sisters encounter another misconception: that their ability to participate in today's workforce lags behind that of their American and European counterparts because of the persistence of traditional attitudes, explicit discrimination, or an absence of opportunities. In reality, under Communism, women in Russia and China were encouraged to help build their nation's economies and were put to work in numbers equal to men. In the Soviet Union, for example, 90 percent of working-age women were in the paid labor force.8 In Brazil, India, and the dynamic economies of the Middle East, traditionally close-knit extended families and the availability of inexpensive domestic help enable ambitious women to mitigate the child care issues that cripple the careers of many Western women professionals.
THE BENEFITS BRIC WOMEN BRING
In addition to providing much-needed qualified talent to growth-minded companies, from Shanghai to São Paulo, from Moscow to Mumbai, educated women have much to offer their employers.
Those markets are increasingly dominated by women. As women flood into management positions, a surprising number are earning salaries greater than their spouses. Women now control two-thirds of all consumer spending. Married women are overwhelmingly the primary decision makers for their family's purchases of food, clothing, health care, education, and household products.
Educated women in emerging markets bring a keen sense of the consumer marketplace to their employers. When translating product development and marketing strategy into emerging markets, the mandate to “think globally and act locally” in pragmatic terms means “hire more women.” Lisandra Ambrozio, Pfizer's human resources director in Brazil, doesn't need convincing. “More than fifty percent of doctors here in Brazil are women. Seventy-five percent of the health decisions made in the family are made by women, not by men. We need to understand what is in the mind of a female doctor, or we need to better understand women, because they are the ones who make the health care decisions in a family.” She continues, “Gender diversity is not a social issue. It's a business issue, not only for Pfizer but for each company in the market.”
Ambrozio's comments are echoed by Hiroo Mirchandani, business unit director at Pfizer, India: “We know women are good at engaging customers, nurturing relationships, and communicating product features. Tapping in to this talent pool provides a competitive advantage.”
In the entrepreneurial economies of emerging markets, women are key to connecting with the main engine of growth: the small-to-medium business market. “The SMB market in emerging markets is the market,” explains Tracy Ann Curtis, Cisco Systems' head of inclusion and diversity for Asia-Pacific and Japan. “It's not the big enterprise market any longer. We're servicing small entrepreneurial companies, and 33 percent of them in Asia are owned by women. If we want to sell into that market, we've got to understand who those women are and how they reflect on the marketplace.”
The diversity of thought, perspective, and experience that educated women add to any organization is multiplied in developing markets. Because of the obstacles they've often had to overcome, they bring a determination and a “can do, leave no stone unturned, we'll find a way” approach to coming up with solutions, says Goldman Sachs's Carlotti. When they solve problems, it sends a signal of “openness, creativity, forward thinking, and an innovative approach” to potential hires as well as clients. He concludes, “For me, when you look at who's coming into the workforce and what they can mean for the development of human capital, it's a no-brainer that women are a competitive advantage.”
AN INTRICATE WEB OF PUSHES AND PULLS
Deeply entrenched stereotypes make it difficult for Western employers to have a clear view of this new tranche of talent. But behind the images—the cliches of the girl from Ipanema with the world's smallest string bikini, the doe-eyed Bollywood heroine, and the docile Asian wife who collects Ferragamo shoes and Chanel jackets by the closetful—is a generation of well-educated women determined to forge a new identity. Thanks to the Internet, movies, and TV, their role models are drawn not from traditional cultural archetypes or national heroines but from around the world. They have a global perspective, a view that includes their role in helping their country develop its new identity.
Even though the potent pool of highly qualified women professionals in emerging markets is composed of neither victims of oppression nor cultural caricatures, organizations should not make the other mistake of assuming that these women are BRIC clones of their counterparts in advanced industrialized economies. In fact, their career dynamics—both the opportunities they aspire to and the challenges they encounter—are complex, fundamentally different, and, says Subha Barry, former global head of diversity at Merrill Lynch, “so nuanced that it's easy to miss the multitude of issues these women are dealing with.”
Among them are these challenges:
The maternal guilt that frequently derails Western women's careers is less onerous among female professionals in the BRICs and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), but they carry a heavy load of “daughterly guilt.” In countries like India, China, and the UAE, where notions of filial piety underpin cultural values and where demographers project an explosion in the percentage of the population over the age of sixty, elder care responsibilities are a ticking time bomb.
Although “extreme jobs”—characterized by extended work weeks, an always-on 24/7 culture, and intense performance pressure—are the norm among highly qualified and ambitious women worldwide, the average workweek for employees of multinational corporations (MNCs) in BRIC nations is especially onerous. Moreover, the demands of work have intensified over the past few years; more than a quarter of the women surveyed by the CWLP report working, on average, eight to eighteen hours more per week than three years ago, additional time that amounts to one to two extra workdays.
Workplace biases faced by professional women in these markets are overt and explicit. At least 40 percent of the women surveyed in Brazil, India, and China have encountered prejudice severe enough to make them consider scaling back their career goals or quitting altogether.
Biases in the workplace are magnified outside. In many emerging market countries, there is such strong social disapproval of—and occasionally outright danger for—women traveling alone that women often avoid industry sectors that require significant travel, such as pharmaceutical sales, and gravitate toward those based in urban, modern environs.
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