Women in China
中国女性
The sky's the limit
天空无限宽广
But it's not exactly heaven
却不尽然是天堂
Nov 26th 2011 | from the print edition
PULLY CHAU SPENT eight years working for the Chinese office of a big international advertising agency and never got a pay rise; there was always some excuse. "It was stupid of me not to ask," she says. "If I had been a Caucasian man, I would have done better." She stuck around because she liked the idea of working for an outfit that was well known in China and hoped to learn something. Eventually she got fed up and took a job with another Western agency, draftfcb, where she is now chairman and CEO for Greater China, based in Shanghai. Just turned 50, glamorous, confident and boundlessly energetic, she could pick and choose from any number of jobs. There are lots of opportunities for women in China, she says―but in business life is still easier for men.
Pully Chau在一家大型国际广告公司的中国办事处工作了八年，但从未有过加薪，总是有这样那样的借口阻挡她的加薪之路。"我不会傻到不提出疑问，"她说，"倘若我是个白人男性，我应该会做得更好。"Pully迟迟不肯跳槽的原因是她喜欢为这样一家中国知名度很高的公司工作，并且希望学到一些东西。但长此以往，她受够了这样的境遇，最终跳槽到另一家西方广告公司DraftFCB。现在，她成为这家公司大中华区的主席和首席执行官，总部设在上海。Pully刚过五十岁，她富有魅力，充满自信，活力四射，对现在的她来说，对任何一种工作都可以随意挑选，手到擒来。她说，在中国，女性拥有很多的机会，但商业之路走得更顺的，依旧还是男性。
Women make up 49% of China's population and 46% of its labour force, a higher proportion than in many Western countries. In large part that is because Mao Zedong, who famously said that "women hold up half the sky", saw them as a resource and launched a campaign to get them to work outside the home. China is generally reckoned to be more open to women than other East Asian countries, with Taiwan somewhat behind, South Korea further back and Japan the worst. And its women expect to be taken seriously; as one Chinese female investment banker in Beijing puts it, "we do not come across as deferential".
中国总人口中49%为女性，其中女性劳动力占总劳动力的46%，这个比例比人很多西方国家都高。这很大程度上要归功于毛泽东，他曾有一句名言："妇女能顶半边天。"他把女性看做一种资源，并发起了让女性在外工作的运动。渐渐地，相较其他东亚国家和地区，中国成为众人眼中对女性更加开放的国家，台湾紧随其后，韩国次之，而日本更次。中国的女性希望受到认真的对待，正如在北京的一位中国女投资银行家所言："中国女性不会给人留下低眉顺眼的印象。"
Young Chinese women have been moving away from the countryside in droves and piling into the electronics factories in the booming coastal belt, leading dreary lives but earning more money than their parents ever dreamed of. Others have been pouring into universities, at home and abroad, and graduating in almost the same numbers as men. And once they have negotiated China's highly competitive education system, they want to get on a career ladder and start climbing. The opportunities are there. Avivah Wittenberg-Cox, who runs a consultancy, 20-first, that helps companies improve the balance between the sexes in senior jobs, points out that China already has a higher proportion of women in the top layers of management than many Western countries.
大批的年轻中国女性从乡村涌进欣欣向荣的沿海地带，她们在电子工厂中工作，生活枯燥，但所赚的钱却远超出她们父母的梦之所及。还有一些进入了国内外高等学府深造，毕业生男女比例几乎旗鼓相当。一旦通过了中国教育系统竞争激烈的独木桥，她们便希望能找到工作，向职业阶梯的上层攀爬。机遇就摆在那里。20-first是一家帮助平衡高层岗位性别比例的咨询公司，其所有者阿维娃・维滕贝格-考克斯指出，中国企业高管的女性比例已经超过了很多西方国家。
The supply of female talent is abundant, says Jin Yu, a partner with McKinsey in Beijing and their most senior woman in China, but once you start funnelling it the numbers come down. She also concedes that there is room for improvement in the way that Chinese companies nurture potential female leaders. The same goes for the Chinese body politic: only 13 of the 204 members elected at the most recent meeting of the Chinese Communist Party's central committee (its top decision-making body) were women.
北京的Jin Yu是麦肯锡咨询公司在中国最资深的女性合伙人，她说，女性人才供应很充足，但是一旦开始进行集中筛选，女性人数就会减少。她同时也承认，中国企业在培养女性领导人方面还有很大的进步空间。而中国政体方面也存在同样的问题：中国共产党中央委员会（中国的最高决策机关）最新选出的204名委员中，只有13名是女性。
Jobs with state-owned companies are popular with Chinese women because at lower levels these are relatively comfortable places to work, with shorter and more predictable hours than in the private sector. But attitudes remain highly conservative and very few women are found in the upper echelons. Wendy (not her real name), a well-qualified woman in her 40s with an MBA, holds down a senior job at China National Petroleum Corporation, the country's largest integrated oil and gas company, but complains that women suffer from discrimination both in her company and her industry. She has had to do a lot of travelling to places like Libya, Sudan and Pakistan and blames her recent divorce on the demands of the job. "You have to give up a lot" to maintain your position at work in a company like hers, she says. After her divorce she applied for a lower-level post with less punishing hours so she could spend more time with her 12-year-old daughter. But she is already studying for her next qualification and plans to go back on the fast track once her daughter is older so she can send her to study in Britain. "Chinese women have a very difficult life," she says.
国有企业的基层岗位与私营企业相比，工作时间较短也较为固定，这些相对舒适的工作岗位很受中国女性的青睐。但是，国有企业的观念仍旧高度保守，女性高层少之又少。Wendy(化名)是一名出类拔萃的女性，她拥有MBA学位，同时也在中国石油天然气集团公司（中国最大的综合油气企业）担任高层职务。但她还是抱怨道，在她所从事的领域和公司内部，女性仍旧受到歧视。她不得不经常到利比亚、苏丹、巴基斯坦这样的地方出差，同时她也把最近的婚姻破裂归咎于工作的影响。Wendy说，若想在这种公司保住自己的位子，"你必须放弃很多东西"。在离婚后，Wendy申请了超负荷工作时间较短的低层岗位，以便有更多的时间陪伴自己十二岁的女儿。但是，她已经开始为拿到下一个文凭而努力，并计划在女儿长大一点后把她送到英国上学，然后自己回到一线岗位工作。她说："中国女性的生活都很不容易。"
Many female high-fliers in China find it easier to work for a multinational. Iris Kang, who heads the business unit for emerging markets at Pfizer, a pharmaceutical company, used to be a doctor in a state-owned hospital but switched to the private sector after a visit to Nepal, where she developed a taste for the capitalist system. She says there is less sex discrimination in multinationals than in Chinese companies, and the number of women in senior posts in her firm is rising rapidly.
在中国，许多女性佼佼者都觉得为跨国公司工作更容易些。Iris Kang是瑞辉制药公司的新兴市场业务部门主管，她曾经是一家国有医院的医生，但到尼泊尔访问的经历让她开始对资本主义制度产生兴趣，之后便跳槽到私营企业。她说，与中国公司相比，跨国公司性别歧视情况相对不算严重，她所在的公司也有越来越多的女性担任高层职务。
Hers is another tale of relentless self-improvement. Soon after she joined the private sector she took an executive MBA at the China Europe International Business School (CEIBS) in Shanghai, China's most highly rated business school, and last year she added a Masters degree in pharmaceutical medicine, all the while heading a team of 120 people in her job with Pfizer. As Ms Kang says, to succeed as a woman in China "you need to be better than a man."
Kang女士的故事是另一部坚韧不拔自我升华的传奇。进入私企后，在辉瑞的工作岗位上领导着120人团队的同时，她在中欧国际工商学院（中国最高等的商学院）取得了在职工商管理硕士学位，又于去年获得了制药学的硕士学位。正如她所说，中国女性若想成功，"你需要比男人更优秀。"
That goes for female entrepreneurs, too. China has plenty: over 29m of them at the latest count, or a quarter of the national total, according to Meng Xiaosi, vice-president of the All-China Women's Federation. And some strike it very rich: seven of the 14 women on last year's Forbes worldwide list of self-made billionaires were from China, with property magnates particularly prominent. China is growing so fast that there are plenty of opportunities for start-ups and less red tape than in more mature economies, and finance is less of a problem than in the West.It is hard to see how these formidable Chinese women can fit any children into their impossibly busy lives, but most of them do. They are entitled to (but don't always get) three months' paid maternity leave and mostly return to work afterwards. That is made a little easier by one big advantage they have over most working women in the West: hands-on grandparents. The older generation has traditionally played a large part in bringing up children in China, and still does. A baby is often farmed out to the grandparents for the first few years of its life, or the grandparents come to live in the family home to look after it. If no grandparents are available, nannies are plentiful and affordable.
这对女性企业家来说亦然。中国有相当多的女企业家，据全国妇联副主席孟晓驷的说法，最新统计显示中国有2900万女企业家，占全国企业家总人数的四分之一。其中有些女企业家非常富有：在去年福布斯杂志的国际亿万富豪榜里，榜上有名的14位女性之中有7位来自中国，其中以房产女巨头尤为突出。中国的快速发展为新起步的企业创造了更多的机会，也免去了在许多更成熟经济体中存在的繁文缛节，同时减弱了财政问题对中国企业家的困扰，相较之下，西方企业家对财政问题更加头疼。。然而，看上去这些杰出的中国女性似乎很难在百忙之中抽出空闲来养育子女，但大部分人的确做到了这点。中国女性享有（但并非一定会得到）三个月的产假，大部分人都会在休假结束后返回工作岗位。但是，摩拳擦掌要照看孙辈的祖父母可以为中国的职业女性分忧，这是大部分西方职业女性所没有的一大优势。从中国传统角度来看，从古至今，老一辈人在抚养孙辈方面都扮演着很重要的角色。通常很小的孩子会交由祖父母看管，或者让祖父母住到子女家中来照看孙辈。如果不能得到祖父母的帮助，请保姆也是方便又划算的方法。
Most of these women seem to stop at one offspring, not only because of the one-child policy (which can be quite leaky) but because any more would be just too difficult to manage. Even looking after the one-and-only takes up a huge amount of time and resources. The whole business of child-rearing has become exhaustingly competitive.
似乎大部分女性只育有一个子女，这不仅是由于独生子女政策（因为钻这项政策的空子很简单），而是因为多子女家庭实在是太难经营了，单单养育独生子女就要耗费很多的时间和资源。养育孩子这件事已然成为一项需要耗尽心力来竞争的事业。
Precious in every way
集万千宠爱于一身的小皇帝们
Grooming the little emperors
让"小皇帝"们全副武装
It starts at kindergarten, which may be of the Monday-to-Friday boarding variety, and can get very expensive even at that level: the best ones are vastly oversubscribed, and although they are state-run, you hear stories about parents being asked for "sponsorship" of up to 200,000 yuan ($32,000) to get in. After that the child has to be manoeuvred into the best school, homework needs to be closely supervised and there is a lot of ferrying around for after-school activities. Steering a child through all this almost amounts to a full-time job. The effort culminates in the gaokao, the national college-entrance exam that determines which, if any, university the youngster can get into.
从幼儿园（也许是工作日寄宿制）开始，这一层级教育所需的费用已经非常昂贵了：最好的幼儿园已经被大量超额预订，就算是国家运营的幼儿园，要求家长缴纳最高达20万人民币"择校费"的现象也时有耳闻。即便经过运作进入最好的学校，也需要紧密监督孩子做作业的情况，并且接送孩子参加各种课外活动。带着孩子做以上这些事情几乎就已经是全职岗位的工作量了，而到了孩子高考（高等学校全国统一考试）的时候，也就是决定孩子能否升学以及进入哪所大学之时，家长更会使出全身解数，付出最大的努力。
What makes life even harder for Chinese women is that most Chinese men still expect them to look after home and family more or less single-handed, whether or not they are holding down a job. That includes caring for elderly parents or relatives, so it does not stop when the children grow up. These are deep-rooted, hard-to-shift attitudes that long pre-date the Mao era. Many Chinese men find it psychologically hard to cope with high-earning wives, and if something has to give it is usually the wife's job. Women who are too stridently successful may have trouble finding a husband in the first place. Even China's female high achievers are now beginning to wonder if they are doing the right thing. In their recent book "Winning the War for Talent in Emerging Markets", Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Ripa Rashid note that "the concept of work-life balance, once foreign…is an increasingly popular topic of conversation."
然而，不管女性有没有工作，大部分的中国男人仍旧希望他们的妻子可以或多或少独自一人照顾家庭，这让中国女性的生活更加不易。承担家庭工作包括了照顾家中年老的父母，这并不会因子女长大成人而结束。这些根深蒂固的观念在毛泽东时代之前很久就存在了。许多中国男性在心理上很难接受高收入的妻子，如果需要做出让步，那么一般都是妻子放弃自己的工作。过于强势的成功女性往往从一开始就很难嫁出去。现在，甚至连出类拔萃的女性都开始有所疑惑，怀疑自己取得成就是否是正确之举。在《赢得新兴市场的人才之战》一书中， Sylvia Ann Hewlett和Ripa Rashid指出："平衡工作与生活这个理念曾经离我们很遥远，但现在越来越受到人们的关注。"
It has already become more acceptable for a woman not to be working, says Helene Zhuge, CEO of bon-tv, a private television network broadcasting from China to the world. If her husband has a good job, or she has money of her own, she can now be a stay-at-home wife without incurring social disapproval. According to Ms Zhuge, this is part of a broader movement over the past few years towards greater social liberalism in China. In the big cities it is now fine for a couple to live together without being married; divorce is getting more common; and being gay is no big deal. But having children out of wedlock is still unusual because the bureaucratic complications are horrendous.
向世界传播中国的私营电视台蓝海电视（Bon-TV）CEO诸葛虹云女士说，现在，不工作的女性反而更加容易受到认同。如果一位女性的丈夫有份好工作，或者她拥有自己的钱，那么她就可以做一名全职太太，外界也不会反对这样的做法。诸葛女士指出，这属于近年来中国向社会自由主义深化发展的广泛活动的一部分。在大城市中，人们现在可以接受未婚同居，离婚更加普遍，同性恋也不再是惊天大事。但是未婚生子仍旧非同寻常，这是因为需要走的后续程序实在是繁杂得可怕。
中国女性
The sky's the limit
天空无限宽广
But it's not exactly heaven
却不尽然是天堂
Nov 26th 2011 | from the print edition
PULLY CHAU SPENT eight years working for the Chinese office of a big international advertising agency and never got a pay rise; there was always some excuse. "It was stupid of me not to ask," she says. "If I had been a Caucasian man, I would have done better." She stuck around because she liked the idea of working for an outfit that was well known in China and hoped to learn something. Eventually she got fed up and took a job with another Western agency, draftfcb, where she is now chairman and CEO for Greater China, based in Shanghai. Just turned 50, glamorous, confident and boundlessly energetic, she could pick and choose from any number of jobs. There are lots of opportunities for women in China, she says―but in business life is still easier for men.
Pully Chau在一家大型国际广告公司的中国办事处工作了八年，但从未有过加薪，总是有这样那样的借口阻挡她的加薪之路。"我不会傻到不提出疑问，"她说，"倘若我是个白人男性，我应该会做得更好。"Pully迟迟不肯跳槽的原因是她喜欢为这样一家中国知名度很高的公司工作，并且希望学到一些东西。但长此以往，她受够了这样的境遇，最终跳槽到另一家西方广告公司DraftFCB。现在，她成为这家公司大中华区的主席和首席执行官，总部设在上海。Pully刚过五十岁，她富有魅力，充满自信，活力四射，对现在的她来说，对任何一种工作都可以随意挑选，手到擒来。她说，在中国，女性拥有很多的机会，但商业之路走得更顺的，依旧还是男性。
Women make up 49% of China's population and 46% of its labour force, a higher proportion than in many Western countries. In large part that is because Mao Zedong, who famously said that "women hold up half the sky", saw them as a resource and launched a campaign to get them to work outside the home. China is generally reckoned to be more open to women than other East Asian countries, with Taiwan somewhat behind, South Korea further back and Japan the worst. And its women expect to be taken seriously; as one Chinese female investment banker in Beijing puts it, "we do not come across as deferential".
中国总人口中49%为女性，其中女性劳动力占总劳动力的46%，这个比例比人很多西方国家都高。这很大程度上要归功于毛泽东，他曾有一句名言："妇女能顶半边天。"他把女性看做一种资源，并发起了让女性在外工作的运动。渐渐地，相较其他东亚国家和地区，中国成为众人眼中对女性更加开放的国家，台湾紧随其后，韩国次之，而日本更次。中国的女性希望受到认真的对待，正如在北京的一位中国女投资银行家所言："中国女性不会给人留下低眉顺眼的印象。"
Young Chinese women have been moving away from the countryside in droves and piling into the electronics factories in the booming coastal belt, leading dreary lives but earning more money than their parents ever dreamed of. Others have been pouring into universities, at home and abroad, and graduating in almost the same numbers as men. And once they have negotiated China's highly competitive education system, they want to get on a career ladder and start climbing. The opportunities are there. Avivah Wittenberg-Cox, who runs a consultancy, 20-first, that helps companies improve the balance between the sexes in senior jobs, points out that China already has a higher proportion of women in the top layers of management than many Western countries.
大批的年轻中国女性从乡村涌进欣欣向荣的沿海地带，她们在电子工厂中工作，生活枯燥，但所赚的钱却远超出她们父母的梦之所及。还有一些进入了国内外高等学府深造，毕业生男女比例几乎旗鼓相当。一旦通过了中国教育系统竞争激烈的独木桥，她们便希望能找到工作，向职业阶梯的上层攀爬。机遇就摆在那里。20-first是一家帮助平衡高层岗位性别比例的咨询公司，其所有者阿维娃・维滕贝格-考克斯指出，中国企业高管的女性比例已经超过了很多西方国家。
The supply of female talent is abundant, says Jin Yu, a partner with McKinsey in Beijing and their most senior woman in China, but once you start funnelling it the numbers come down. She also concedes that there is room for improvement in the way that Chinese companies nurture potential female leaders. The same goes for the Chinese body politic: only 13 of the 204 members elected at the most recent meeting of the Chinese Communist Party's central committee (its top decision-making body) were women.
北京的Jin Yu是麦肯锡咨询公司在中国最资深的女性合伙人，她说，女性人才供应很充足，但是一旦开始进行集中筛选，女性人数就会减少。她同时也承认，中国企业在培养女性领导人方面还有很大的进步空间。而中国政体方面也存在同样的问题：中国共产党中央委员会（中国的最高决策机关）最新选出的204名委员中，只有13名是女性。
Jobs with state-owned companies are popular with Chinese women because at lower levels these are relatively comfortable places to work, with shorter and more predictable hours than in the private sector. But attitudes remain highly conservative and very few women are found in the upper echelons. Wendy (not her real name), a well-qualified woman in her 40s with an MBA, holds down a senior job at China National Petroleum Corporation, the country's largest integrated oil and gas company, but complains that women suffer from discrimination both in her company and her industry. She has had to do a lot of travelling to places like Libya, Sudan and Pakistan and blames her recent divorce on the demands of the job. "You have to give up a lot" to maintain your position at work in a company like hers, she says. After her divorce she applied for a lower-level post with less punishing hours so she could spend more time with her 12-year-old daughter. But she is already studying for her next qualification and plans to go back on the fast track once her daughter is older so she can send her to study in Britain. "Chinese women have a very difficult life," she says.
国有企业的基层岗位与私营企业相比，工作时间较短也较为固定，这些相对舒适的工作岗位很受中国女性的青睐。但是，国有企业的观念仍旧高度保守，女性高层少之又少。Wendy(化名)是一名出类拔萃的女性，她拥有MBA学位，同时也在中国石油天然气集团公司（中国最大的综合油气企业）担任高层职务。但她还是抱怨道，在她所从事的领域和公司内部，女性仍旧受到歧视。她不得不经常到利比亚、苏丹、巴基斯坦这样的地方出差，同时她也把最近的婚姻破裂归咎于工作的影响。Wendy说，若想在这种公司保住自己的位子，"你必须放弃很多东西"。在离婚后，Wendy申请了超负荷工作时间较短的低层岗位，以便有更多的时间陪伴自己十二岁的女儿。但是，她已经开始为拿到下一个文凭而努力，并计划在女儿长大一点后把她送到英国上学，然后自己回到一线岗位工作。她说："中国女性的生活都很不容易。"
Many female high-fliers in China find it easier to work for a multinational. Iris Kang, who heads the business unit for emerging markets at Pfizer, a pharmaceutical company, used to be a doctor in a state-owned hospital but switched to the private sector after a visit to Nepal, where she developed a taste for the capitalist system. She says there is less sex discrimination in multinationals than in Chinese companies, and the number of women in senior posts in her firm is rising rapidly.
在中国，许多女性佼佼者都觉得为跨国公司工作更容易些。Iris Kang是瑞辉制药公司的新兴市场业务部门主管，她曾经是一家国有医院的医生，但到尼泊尔访问的经历让她开始对资本主义制度产生兴趣，之后便跳槽到私营企业。她说，与中国公司相比，跨国公司性别歧视情况相对不算严重，她所在的公司也有越来越多的女性担任高层职务。
Hers is another tale of relentless self-improvement. Soon after she joined the private sector she took an executive MBA at the China Europe International Business School (CEIBS) in Shanghai, China's most highly rated business school, and last year she added a Masters degree in pharmaceutical medicine, all the while heading a team of 120 people in her job with Pfizer. As Ms Kang says, to succeed as a woman in China "you need to be better than a man."
Kang女士的故事是另一部坚韧不拔自我升华的传奇。进入私企后，在辉瑞的工作岗位上领导着120人团队的同时，她在中欧国际工商学院（中国最高等的商学院）取得了在职工商管理硕士学位，又于去年获得了制药学的硕士学位。正如她所说，中国女性若想成功，"你需要比男人更优秀。"
That goes for female entrepreneurs, too. China has plenty: over 29m of them at the latest count, or a quarter of the national total, according to Meng Xiaosi, vice-president of the All-China Women's Federation. And some strike it very rich: seven of the 14 women on last year's Forbes worldwide list of self-made billionaires were from China, with property magnates particularly prominent. China is growing so fast that there are plenty of opportunities for start-ups and less red tape than in more mature economies, and finance is less of a problem than in the West.It is hard to see how these formidable Chinese women can fit any children into their impossibly busy lives, but most of them do. They are entitled to (but don't always get) three months' paid maternity leave and mostly return to work afterwards. That is made a little easier by one big advantage they have over most working women in the West: hands-on grandparents. The older generation has traditionally played a large part in bringing up children in China, and still does. A baby is often farmed out to the grandparents for the first few years of its life, or the grandparents come to live in the family home to look after it. If no grandparents are available, nannies are plentiful and affordable.
这对女性企业家来说亦然。中国有相当多的女企业家，据全国妇联副主席孟晓驷的说法，最新统计显示中国有2900万女企业家，占全国企业家总人数的四分之一。其中有些女企业家非常富有：在去年福布斯杂志的国际亿万富豪榜里，榜上有名的14位女性之中有7位来自中国，其中以房产女巨头尤为突出。中国的快速发展为新起步的企业创造了更多的机会，也免去了在许多更成熟经济体中存在的繁文缛节，同时减弱了财政问题对中国企业家的困扰，相较之下，西方企业家对财政问题更加头疼。。然而，看上去这些杰出的中国女性似乎很难在百忙之中抽出空闲来养育子女，但大部分人的确做到了这点。中国女性享有（但并非一定会得到）三个月的产假，大部分人都会在休假结束后返回工作岗位。但是，摩拳擦掌要照看孙辈的祖父母可以为中国的职业女性分忧，这是大部分西方职业女性所没有的一大优势。从中国传统角度来看，从古至今，老一辈人在抚养孙辈方面都扮演着很重要的角色。通常很小的孩子会交由祖父母看管，或者让祖父母住到子女家中来照看孙辈。如果不能得到祖父母的帮助，请保姆也是方便又划算的方法。
Most of these women seem to stop at one offspring, not only because of the one-child policy (which can be quite leaky) but because any more would be just too difficult to manage. Even looking after the one-and-only takes up a huge amount of time and resources. The whole business of child-rearing has become exhaustingly competitive.
似乎大部分女性只育有一个子女，这不仅是由于独生子女政策（因为钻这项政策的空子很简单），而是因为多子女家庭实在是太难经营了，单单养育独生子女就要耗费很多的时间和资源。养育孩子这件事已然成为一项需要耗尽心力来竞争的事业。
Precious in every way
集万千宠爱于一身的小皇帝们
Grooming the little emperors
让"小皇帝"们全副武装
It starts at kindergarten, which may be of the Monday-to-Friday boarding variety, and can get very expensive even at that level: the best ones are vastly oversubscribed, and although they are state-run, you hear stories about parents being asked for "sponsorship" of up to 200,000 yuan ($32,000) to get in. After that the child has to be manoeuvred into the best school, homework needs to be closely supervised and there is a lot of ferrying around for after-school activities. Steering a child through all this almost amounts to a full-time job. The effort culminates in the gaokao, the national college-entrance exam that determines which, if any, university the youngster can get into.
从幼儿园（也许是工作日寄宿制）开始，这一层级教育所需的费用已经非常昂贵了：最好的幼儿园已经被大量超额预订，就算是国家运营的幼儿园，要求家长缴纳最高达20万人民币"择校费"的现象也时有耳闻。即便经过运作进入最好的学校，也需要紧密监督孩子做作业的情况，并且接送孩子参加各种课外活动。带着孩子做以上这些事情几乎就已经是全职岗位的工作量了，而到了孩子高考（高等学校全国统一考试）的时候，也就是决定孩子能否升学以及进入哪所大学之时，家长更会使出全身解数，付出最大的努力。
What makes life even harder for Chinese women is that most Chinese men still expect them to look after home and family more or less single-handed, whether or not they are holding down a job. That includes caring for elderly parents or relatives, so it does not stop when the children grow up. These are deep-rooted, hard-to-shift attitudes that long pre-date the Mao era. Many Chinese men find it psychologically hard to cope with high-earning wives, and if something has to give it is usually the wife's job. Women who are too stridently successful may have trouble finding a husband in the first place. Even China's female high achievers are now beginning to wonder if they are doing the right thing. In their recent book "Winning the War for Talent in Emerging Markets", Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Ripa Rashid note that "the concept of work-life balance, once foreign…is an increasingly popular topic of conversation."
然而，不管女性有没有工作，大部分的中国男人仍旧希望他们的妻子可以或多或少独自一人照顾家庭，这让中国女性的生活更加不易。承担家庭工作包括了照顾家中年老的父母，这并不会因子女长大成人而结束。这些根深蒂固的观念在毛泽东时代之前很久就存在了。许多中国男性在心理上很难接受高收入的妻子，如果需要做出让步，那么一般都是妻子放弃自己的工作。过于强势的成功女性往往从一开始就很难嫁出去。现在，甚至连出类拔萃的女性都开始有所疑惑，怀疑自己取得成就是否是正确之举。在《赢得新兴市场的人才之战》一书中， Sylvia Ann Hewlett和Ripa Rashid指出："平衡工作与生活这个理念曾经离我们很遥远，但现在越来越受到人们的关注。"
It has already become more acceptable for a woman not to be working, says Helene Zhuge, CEO of bon-tv, a private television network broadcasting from China to the world. If her husband has a good job, or she has money of her own, she can now be a stay-at-home wife without incurring social disapproval. According to Ms Zhuge, this is part of a broader movement over the past few years towards greater social liberalism in China. In the big cities it is now fine for a couple to live together without being married; divorce is getting more common; and being gay is no big deal. But having children out of wedlock is still unusual because the bureaucratic complications are horrendous.
向世界传播中国的私营电视台蓝海电视（Bon-TV）CEO诸葛虹云女士说，现在，不工作的女性反而更加容易受到认同。如果一位女性的丈夫有份好工作，或者她拥有自己的钱，那么她就可以做一名全职太太，外界也不会反对这样的做法。诸葛女士指出，这属于近年来中国向社会自由主义深化发展的广泛活动的一部分。在大城市中，人们现在可以接受未婚同居，离婚更加普遍，同性恋也不再是惊天大事。但是未婚生子仍旧非同寻常，这是因为需要走的后续程序实在是繁杂得可怕。
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