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The Next Global Talent Pool
Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Ripa Rashid, authors of “Winning the War for Talent in Emerging Markets: Why Women Are the Solution.”
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Featured Guests: Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Ripa Rashid of the Center for Work-Life Policy. They are the authors of Winning the War for Talent in Emerging Markets: Why Women Are the Solution.
SARAH GREEN: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Sarah Green. Today we’re talking about a hidden global talent pool. I’m on the phone with Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Ripa Rashid of the Center for Worklife Policy. They’re the authors of the new book, Winning The War For Talent In Emerging Markets: Why Women Are The Solution. Sylvia, thanks so much for joining us.
SYLVIA ANN HEWLETT: It’s great to be with you.
And Ripa, it’s great to have you too.
RIPA RASHID: Thanks so much, Sarah.
SARAH GREEN: So we’re talking about a war for talent. But that’s maybe slightly cognitively dissonant for some people since all the headlines, at least in the developed world these days, are about a jobs crisis.
SYLVIA ANN HEWLETT: Absolutely. But whereas in the US and in Europe, there’s this flat-lined economy going on. In emerging markets, it’s a very different scene as we know. 8%, 9%, 10% growth a year is not unusual in countries like Brazil or China, India.
And so this book that looks at the growth hubs of the world really shows that, hey, there’s a potential talent constraint. Employers are struggling to find the skills they need in order to fill the orders, something that does seem strange if you live in Michigan, for instance. But it’s absolutely true in India.
SARAH GREEN: So as I was reading through the book and reading some of this research you’ve compiled on women in these growth markets, I was really struck by some of the statistics that you’ve generated on how women in the so-called brick countries are really quite more ambitious than American women.
They’re more likely to hold a job than an American woman. And they also have some advantages even when it comes to things like child care, which I found surprising. So walk us through some of that surprising good news for women in those markets.
RIPA RASHID: I think the first piece is really around a really strong presence of women in the tertiary education realm. It even takes people by surprise that in the US, women are 58% of college graduates. But if you look at Russia and Brazil, very similar numbers. Brazil, 60% of college graduates are women. Russia, 57%. So there’s this growing, what we call, achievement gap that women are really seeming to push forward, leaving men behind.
In India and China, it’s less pronounced. But the present representation of women is pretty high. When you look at labor force participation rates, which is obviously for women who are highly qualified as well as much less qualified, those numbers are pretty surprising too. China, 75% women’s labor force participation. This is higher than the US or the UK. So there’s some really basic macroeconomic large number good news there.
In terms of ambition, this is the part that really took a lot of people by surprise. We found that women in the brick countries were extraordinarily ambitious and committed to work. 80% of women in Brazil, 86% in India aspire to hold a top job. The extraordinary levels of ambition, really, in these countries make the levels of ambition we record in the US, for instance, pale by comparison. Only 52% of women in the US and the comparative category feel themselves as ambitious.
SYLVIA ANN HEWLETT: And one thing in China that we found fascinating was the impact of very small families, the one child policy, on women’s ambition. Obviously if you only have one kid and you’ve got four elders to look after that kid, the odds are that child is not going to be a huge burden in your career.
But the thing we had not appreciated until we did this research was that for the younger worker, the professional woman who’s 30 years old and grew up in a family that just had one child– and she was the only. She didn’t have a brother. And so she became the recipient of the full force of her father’s ambition.
And we found that in the young, cutting edge, highly ambitious Chinese female population, this situation was one reason why they were so fiercely committed to achievement.
SARAH GREEN: I’m interested in exploring this why part of this a little bit more. And I know that this book is really focused on emerging markets. But I know the Center for Worklife Policy also has done a lot of research in the United States. So why are women in these markets more ambitious? Or maybe a different way of phrasing it is maybe, why are American women comparatively so much less ambitious?
SYLVIA ANN HEWLETT: The work I’ve done in the US– and I’ve done two big studies which look at women’s ambition over their careers. What you find is that 25 year old women are really quite ambitious. Not as ambitious perhaps as those Chinese women I was talking about, but really up there and as ambitious as their male colleagues. But over time, those women hit their heads against a lot of brick walls. And they gradually downsize their dreams. So that a 38 year old career woman is much less ambitious than a 25 year old.
And one thing that happens in the US is that a lot of women get clobbered by childbearing. This is not a country with huge amounts of high quality inexpensive child care. It’s very hard to have two kids and stay full-time. And when you take an off-ramp, take a break from employment, it’s incredibly hard to recover, either in terms of getting back into a mainstream job or in terms of getting back to the earnings that you used to have before children.
And in these brick countries, childbearing isn’t nearly as much of a knock. One reason is that, of course, in China there’s these one child policies, very low birth rates. And more importantly perhaps in all of these countries, there is much more extended family help. In India, 58% of professional women have either their parents or their in-laws living with them. And they take a big role in looking after the next generation.
The figure in the US is just 3% of women are in that situation. And of course in all of these countries, there is access to inexpensive domestic help. And obviously if you live in New York or Houston or any of the major centers in the mature markets, that’s not true.
RIPA RASHID: I think that in addition to some of these– the differences in the personal factors that women contend with is what we call the blank slate phenomenon. So when organizations are establishing themselves in these new markets, they’re often a little more open, we found, to experimenting with different models, instead of having inherited these legacy model for 50 years ago that were designed to run a 100% male workforce. Often, these companies are starting off small and growing rapidly. And there’s much more opportunity to be creative.
SARAH GREEN: So we’ve been talking so far about there being a good news story for women in emerging markets. But I know it’s not all coming up roses for them, because you talk in the book about some of the challenges they face. What are some of those challenges?
RIPA RASHID: There’s a lot of cultural concern about women traveling alone for work. We actually find that in some places like India and the UAE, which was part of our study as well where women are living within more traditional environments, this may not be as much of a surprise. But even in places like China where communism, in principle, leveled the playing field for women in some ways, there’s still quite a lot of concern about women traveling, cultural perception and disapproval of women traveling alone for work.
In India, this manifests itself in women staying away from certain kinds of roles, like sales roles that require them to travel to semi-rural areas. So there’s a whole slew of barriers. In the Middle East, Emirati women often, if they’re unmarried, are unable to travel without an escort internationally. So these are very different types of workplace barriers that women are facing.
SYLVIA ANN HEWLETT: And one thing that’s happening, which is fascinating, is that there’s some very creative solutions coming from employers.
For instance, in India some of the cutting edge companies have begun holding extended family days at work, where they don’t just bring in the husband and the children, but they bring in the in-laws and the extended family who get caught up on the tremendous opportunities that the daughter or daughter-in-law are being offered, how well they’re doing, and how the company is going to look after them and deal with any of the possible threats that are on the minds of, say, the mother-in-law.
And so there is a tremendous effort going on to get buy in, particularly from the older generation. And that is one of the greatest gifts you can give an ambitious 30 year old, of course, is to get the mother-in-law on her side.
RIPA RASHID: And if I might jump in quickly with a very short anecdote on that point. One of the people we interviewed for this study worked for Ernst & Young, and established a global shared services center in India. And she was of Indian heritage but had worked her entire career in the US. And this was her first work experience there. But she was very attuned to the cultural nuances of her female employees. And she was one of the first people to institute one of these family days. And 10 years later, she established a center in 2001.
10 years later, she still has tears in her eyes when she shares with us a letter she received from one of the first family days from a father-in-law who wrote to her and said, thank you for hosting me. I was really moved by the importance my daughter-in-law has in your workplace. My daughter-in-law will work for Ernst & Young forever.
SARAH GREEN: Oh my gosh.
RIPA RASHID: So that story just exemplifies the importance of the buy in because women, as Sylvia mentioned earlier, are living in extended family situations. I was just in India two weeks ago, and one of the women in my focus groups lived in a family of 22. So this is alive and well and real.
SYLVIA ANN HEWLETT: Quite a lot of babysitters there. I was immediately jealous.
SARAH GREEN: So as we’ve been talking about this nuanced portrait of the talented woman, the underutilized, perhaps talented woman in these growth markets, I’m wondering why have we heard so much about, for instance, women as the beneficiaries of microfinance, but we’ve never heard this story before?
SYLVIA ANN HEWLETT: Right. One thing that we did is we went into this study, now two years ago because we needed to do such a lot of data collection that took a while, was we rounded up the literature. And there seemed to be two narratives out there. One, there’s a whole bunch of business books on emerging markets. Think of Nandan Nilekani’s great book called Reimagining India. These books have nothing on women at all. In Nilekani’s book he has two pages, which is actually a rundown of fertility rates.
And then there’s another literature, which is typified by the Half The Sky book, the Kristof and WuDunn book. And that really is about oppression, illiteracy, and the terrible conditions of women in the lower half of the populations in these countries. And obviously in these books, microfinance is seen to be a great palliative. It’s what you can aspire to as a rather down beaten, oppressed woman. And in a sense, that narrative is tremendously true.
But there is another story. The story of what is happening with these extraordinarily vital aspiration-filled educated women in these markets. And they are about 25% of the population. It’s not a sin of a crust. And this is a story that hasn’t been told.
SARAH GREEN: I thank you both for coming on the program and starting to tell that story today.
SYLVIA ANN HEWLETT: You’re welcome.
RIPA RASHID: Thank you so much, Sarah.
SARAH GREEN: That was Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Ripa Rashid. The book is Winning The War For Talent In Emerging Markets. For more, visit hbr.org.