TV executive Michelle Guthrie is adamant she wouldn't have got the high-flying promotions she's had in Asia if she were living in her native Australia. "It's a different world here - the opportunities for women are so much better than in the West," Guthrie tells AFP. "There is extraordinary disregard for gender here." The chief executive of STAR satellite TV, one of the region's largest television companies, Guthrie commands a station watched by 100 million people every day in 35 countries.
She is one of a growing number of female executives from Islamic Bangladesh to Confucian China to majority Hindu India who have managed to rise above cultural obstacles that carve strict roles for women to get ahead in business. "I really feel like I am suppressed when I go to Europe, there is much more chauvenism there," adds Guthrie.
According to research by Hong Kong Baptist University professor of management, Anne Marie Francesco, Asia's female executives are not only beating the men, more importantly they are doing so on their own terms. "In the West there is a tendency for businesswomen to emulate their male counterparts, co-opting their management styles," Francesco says. "But in Asia women are running corporations in their own feminine way." Cecile Bonnefond, president of venerable French champagne house Veuve Clicquot, the sponsor of world-wide businesswomen's awards for 33 years, agrees, saying she has been especially impressed by the attitudes of Chinese businesswomen.
"We know there are a lot of Chinese entrepreneurs who are women - who are young and tough," says Bonnefond. "They are not afraid of anything. They are fearless. They just go, run and get on with it."
The reasons for such differences are manifold but mostly cultural, says Francesco, an American academic.
"Much of it comes down to views of women's roles," she says. "Asia has more traditional views of a woman's role; she should provide and be a good mother to the family. But it's in the way it is applied that the difference is found."
She points, for example, to survey research that show Asians welcome women working long hours because it implies they are trying hard to provide for the family.
"Whereas in the West women who work long hours are viewed as being indulgent and pursuing their own selfish goals; that they are not providing," says Francesco.
It is difficult to compare the situation of developing economies in Asia with the more entrenched economies of the West, but academic research and anecdotal evidence from executives around the region suggest women are proportionately more visible in Asian business.
A recent poll by the Asian Wall Street Journal found at least three Chinese women featured in its annual top 50 world businesswomen: Xie Qihua, chairwoman of China's Shanghai Baosteel Group, Wu Xiaoling, deputy governor of the People's Bank of China and Yang Mianmian, president of China's Haier Group.
In Islamic Bangladesh the number of women entrepreneurs has risen from a few dozen in the 1980s to more than 5,000 in 2004, according to a survey by the Women Entrepreneurship Development Project of Dhaka Chamber of Commerce and Industry.
"Most of these women run handicrafts and other businesses. Some of them have become so successful that they even command respect in this male dominated society," says Molla Sahidul Haque, a consultant on the project.
Zaha Rina Zahari, chief executive of Malaysian brokerage RHB Securities, says the story is the same in her native country.
"I don't take the ladder, I take the lift," she says of her progress through corporate life. Although gender equality is new to Malaysia - it only outlawed discrimination in 2001 - women occupy top posts in a number of high-profile companies, such as Bank Negara (Central Bank) governor Zeti Akhtar Aziz, Yvonne Chia, the Hong Leong Bank group chief executive and Mohaiyani Shamsudin.
While in the West careers and families are often viewed as incompatible, Zahari says that in Malaysia, like many Asian countries, no such attitudes prevail.
"(There's) no problem," she says. "In fact I was just voted Avon Mother of the Year. My family comes first. My work is what I do for fun."
The picture in developed - and more Western - economies is gloomier. While laws banning sex discrimination were passed in Australia more than two decades ago, many women executives there complain they still have to contend with a "macho" business culture that blocks their progress.
Women's salaries remain about 16 percent lower that men's and 47.3 percent of companies have no women directors. And in Japan, despite a 1986 law ensuring gender equality at the workplace, the latest data shows only 1.8 percent of businesswomen hold the title of head of a department or division. In 2003, women earned 66.8 yen for every 100 yen men earned. Francesco believes part of the reason women are getting better treatment in developing countries is because their economies entered the global system further along the socio-economic development curve.
"They have entered the world economy at a time when many social privileges have already been established for women world-wide," she says. Veuve's Bonnefond agrees. "With economic development it was thought you had to go from A-Z, but now it is known you can jump over B-Y," she said.
Guthrie, winner of this year's Veuve award in Hong Kong puts the difference down to the need to get things done. "There is a culture here that is more rewarding of talent," she says. "They don't want to know who you are, just whether or not you can do the job."
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