I am visiting Shanghai for the first time for the FT’s Women at the Top conference. First impressions are of traffic, skyscrapers vanishing into smog and a bullet train disappearing into the distance.
Statistics about China tend to the extravagant but some of those connected with gender issues fascinate me. China accounts for more than half the female millionaires in the world, for example. They are unafraid to embrace high-powered status symbols: women buy 30 per cent of the 400 or so Maseratis sold in China, against five per cent of those in the west. And as I logged into the hotel’s WiFi, the most-read story on the BBC was about young Chinese women training as bodyguards – all very Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
The delegates are an impressively eclectic group, 180 women and men who have flown in from Brazil, America, Korea and, of course, China. In her keynote address Melanne Verveer, US ambassador-at-large for Global Women’s Issues, said – perhaps with more assertion than conviction – that women are the solution to the global downturn. In possibly the easiest clap line for a room full of women, she cites a Harvard Business Review case study: “If a group includes more women, its collective intelligence rises.” But, for all the economic aspirations, the audience responds most warmly to personal revelations. Maria das Graças Silva Foster, gas and energy director of the Brazilian multinational Petrobras (85 per cent male), draws murmured support when she says when she is with her children, she loves them, but, in the office, “I forget I have a husband.” As I told the audience, the solution to the work-life balance may be temporary amnesia. Confessing to having five children with two husbands, another speaker says, “That’s diversity.” The evening closes with Huang Ying, a famous Chinese opera star, singing Puccini in a fabulous pink fluffy boa before being probed by Chen Luyu, a talkshow host, about the price of fame, the last time she cried and whether she can cook (she can’t).