Edie Lush

Nǐ hǎo Shanghai

Happily landed in Shanghai yesterday and am freshly back from the inaugural event of the Dell Women’s Entrepreneur Network – ‘Take Your Own Path Through Global Tech Strategies’ event held at the Glamour Bar at M on the Bund.

It’ll be a jam packed couple of days starting off with breakfast with Dell’s PH Ferrand in the morning but before I head to bed I thought I would jot down one interesting conversation I had about women in China. From 1949 women were treated equally under communism and you’re almost as likely to see a female doctor or engineer as you are a male one. The impact of the ‘one child’ policy means that women can go back to work much sooner than in other parts of the world where women take quite a few years out of full time work to look after kids. There is also a lot of family help around – that one child has four doting grandparents to help with the child rearing. I learned that it is written into the Chinese ‘constitution’ that women can breastfeed at work. but that with economic growth things are changing a bit. There is growing family pressure to get married, have a baby and quit working that didn’t exist before.