Better future awaits career women

I lived in Hohhot, capital of the Inner Mongolia autonomous region, for two years from 1981. One of my many research projects was to investigate the status of housewives and career women. I quickly learned that married women not only controlled family finances, but also took joint decisions on major family purchases. I also learned that they did not fear their husbands.

The workplace, however, was a different story. In the 1980s, most of the students in local universities were males. Female students were diligent, talented and capable, but knew they had to work within a cultural bias that assumed they should be more dedicated to their families, especially children, than their work and career.

The bias in recruitment and promotion that favored men over women arose less from observational assessments of women's real work performance than it did from deep-seated cultural conviction that women were motivated by love for the family, and not career.