
Credit: Sikarin Fon Thanachaiary/World Economic Forum, Creative Commons
Women work outside the home at higher rates in China than they do in the United States. But that doesn’t mean they’re getting the top jobs.
Women’s participation in China’s labor force is dropping dramatically, as The Wire reports in this week’s issue. And even though China still has nearly 60 percent of working-age women in the workforce — higher than the United States and the European Union — that representation has not translated to higher representation in executive positions. By sampling data from Chinese publicly traded firms, we found that Chinese companies were no more likely to have a woman CEO as firms in the U.S.
In this week’s issue, The Wire examines gender disparities in leadership positions at listed Chinese companies and state-owned enterprises, and zooms in on some of the women who have clinched the CEO title.
Few and Far Between
Of the 403 Chinese companies The Wire examined121 of the 424 Chinese companies in the graphic below were listed on multiple exchanges, 6.7 percent currently have at least one female CEO; that was slightly lower than the 7.4 percent of women who hold the chief executive title at Fortune 500 companies.
The world’s largest companies are barely synonymous with racial and gender diversity, but slowly, progress is inching forward. A new rule proposed by the Nasdaq, for instance, would require that companies on its stock exchange have at least one woman — and one person of color or LGBTQ+ person — on the board of directors. The exchanges themselves have just begun bringing women into the top roles, too — the NYSE appointed a female president for the first time in 2017, and the Nasdaq promoted COO Stacey Cunningham to the top job in 2018.
In a gender breakdown of CEOs at listed Chinese companies, it is notable that those companies that list on U.S. exchanges have about equal representation as U.S. Fortune 500 companies, and about twice as many women CEOs as the top 200 companies that list on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

Data: Company websites, public filings, CapitalIQ’s S&P, Catalyst
The gender gap is far more pronounced at state-owned enterprises, according to a study conducted by the Peterson Institute of International Economics.2See our accompanying article in this issue by Katrina Northrop here. Among central, nonfinancial state-owned enterprises, 24 percent of employees are women while just 5 percent of senior executives are. Of the seniors executives, there are only two board chairs and three managing directors across the 126 companies. A World Bank analysis estimated that nearly 35 million people were employed at state-owned enterprises in 2017, giving extra weight to the rate at which women rise through the ranks.

Data: Peterson Institution for International Economics
Where Women Lead
Many of China’s female CEOs founded the companies they lead, including pharmaceutical giants, educational corporations, and an asset manager. Of the 27 women CEOs that The Wire found, at least eight founded or co-founded the company they worked at.
Learn more about 12 of the CEOs — and their enterprises — below.

Data: Company websites, public filings, CapitalIQ’s S&P
A Closer Look
One female-founded and led Chinese company is Hangzhou Tigermed Consulting, which made a splash in the Hong Kong Stock Exchange this year. Co-founders CEO Cao Xiaochun and Chairman Ye Xiaoping started Tigermed in 2004 and, in August, raised $1.38 billion in its secondary listing in Hong Kong, making it 2020’s largest healthcare IPO in Asia at the time.
Tigermed has partnered with such companies as AstraZeneca, which has made headlines this year for its work on a Covid-19 vaccine, and HaiHe Biopharma, a cancer-focused startup that’s raised over $300 million since it was founded 2011.

Data: WireScreen, CapitalIQ’s S&P, Hurun, company website

Hannah Reale is a staff writer with The Wire. Previously, she reported for the New England Center for Investigative Reporting, The West Side Rag, and her college newspaper, The Wesleyan Argus. @hannahereale