Comment

Hey grandma, girls are now a force to be reckoned with

By Renee Haines (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-09-28 08:09

Would someone please hand this column to the next mother-in-law who blames her son's wife for giving birth to a girl instead of a boy. It's your son, grandma, who was responsible for determining the sex of the child.

I was stunned when an older woman regaled me in English with delightful stories about Beijing, only to slip in a negative comment about her son's wife, who had recently given birth to a daughter.

It's Science 101 (the really basic stuff) that this woman apparently skipped in school or ignored. The woman's egg carries an X chromosome. The man's sperm carries the X and Y chromosome. At the point of conception, the man's sperm delivers either an X or Y chromosome that determines whether the baby will be a girl (XX) or boy (XY).

No amount of folk medicine or ancient calendar tricks will change this scientific fact. This is the 21st century, and women have to suffer discrimination in daily life without getting wrongly blamed for the gender of their children.

China's reported history of a preference for sons over daughters is certainly not unique to China. Men are better at farming, rural families say. Boys will grow up to take care of us in our old age, since they will make more money, say urban families.

I hope that the Beijing grandmother I met comes across the Sept 6 issue of Newsweek magazine's international editions. The US-based magazine placed a large, sharply focused photograph of a Chinese woman on the cover. In the background is a fuzzy-focused, small photograph of a woman with Western features.

The title on the cover of the magazine reads: The Power Sex: The Secret Behind the Overwhelming Ambition of Chinese Women. The gist of the story is that Chinese women are much more ambitious than Western women.

The article cites a study by the US-based Center for Work-Life Policy that reported that nearly two-thirds of college-educated Chinese women describe themselves as very ambitious versus one-third of college-educated American women.

More Chinese women are in the workplace (77 percent) than American women (69 percent), the study found. The Chinese government has a higher percentage of women (21.3 percent) leaders than the US Congress.

When it comes to business, a greater percentage of women are senior managers in China than in either the European Union or the United States, the magazine reported, citing a study from Grant Thornton International.

If you want someone to brag about in the future, grandma, you should be really happy to have that Chinese granddaughter.

But these women are not thriving in spite of parents like the one I met, who is fast becoming the exception to the evolving outlook for women in China.

Every day in Beijing, I see grandparents and parents doting on daughters as sons. They want these daughters to go to college and succeed. And these daughters do succeed.

As is the case in many other countries, these daughters also have to be smarter than sons, because men still get paid more and hold more positions of power. No country has reached "gender parity", according to the latest report on equality and women from the World Economic Forum, which met in Tianjin in September.

The only countries that come close are Nordic countries such as Iceland (No 1) at more than 80 percent parity, Finland (No 2) and Norway (No 3). The US ranks No 31 on that list, and China is No 60. Japan is No 101.

The Chinese government accords women equal rights, as do US laws but sometimes reality paints a different picture.

Then again, yesterday is the past. Old-fashioned thinking gives way to modern trends. The young women I've met in Beijing are smart and aware, they have smart mothers, and this mother-daughter "power sex" generation surely will prove to be the mentors and role models that will change how women are treated by future generations.

Picture this scene in a Beijing city park. A grandmother shows off her new grandson, and another grandmother's smile widens as she boasts that she has a granddaughter.

The two women are equally proud and hopeful. This is not wishful thinking about the future; it's happening right now.

China Daily