October 22, 2007

Splintering Asia's glass ceiling (see also Global Power 50)

Choosing the region's top businesswomen is easy, writes Eric Ellis, but where are all the Australians?

EVERY year at about this time, Fortune - the New York-based magazine I report for from Asia - publishes its annual "most powerful women in global business" issue.

My job, with colleagues, is to trawl through the year's corporate power plays, consult widely and propose a dozen or so worthy candidates from my patch to the editorial panel that decides the international rankings.

It's a fascinating exercise. It tells you where wealth is forming fast - China and India - and where it's not (in most of Africa and Latin America). It also says something about the global status of women and where that notorious glass ceiling is still evident.

Closer to home, it explodes a few myths about the role of women in what many Australians regard as a misogynist Asian neighbourhood.

Sure, the Indian subcontinent has serious religious and cultural issues with the treatment of women. But it's hard not be inspired by the Karachi-based banker Zarine Aziz, who has spent a decade as chief executive officer of the $US500 million ($560 million) First Women Bank, where she has lifted thousands of Pakistani women out of poverty - often carrying their menfolk with them.

The daily life-and-death issues on Aziz's to-do list are something that Gail Kelly - recently of St George Bank and soon to move to the top job at Westpac - for all her talent, doesn't have deal with in her comfy Sydney boardroom.

The Asia part of the exercise is easy enough; I can name a dozen candidates pretty much off the top of my head, such as Singapore's Madame Ho Ching, boss at state-owned Temasek Holdings.

At No. 12, she's the highest-ranked Asian on Fortune's international list, and heaven help you legally if you say she got her job because she's a member of the ruling Lee family (her husband is Singapore's Prime Minister). In the five years the formidable Ho has been at Temasek, its assets have leapt to more than $US120 billion, with about $US20 billion staked in Australia. Temasek's primary asset, SingTel Optus, is run by a woman, Chua Sock Koong, promoted from chief financial officer after Madame Ho's brother-in-law stepped down last year as CEO.

The Asian contenders are getting more numerous and richer by the year. A new gang of mainland Chinese tycoons, such as the president of the whitegoods maker Haier, Yang Mianmian, Cheung Yan of the emerging paper giant Nine Dragons and Sun Yafang of Huawei, the Asian Cisco, have staked their positions and will move up the list as China does, and as the lower-level Europeans are doubtless replaced by newly minted mainland tycoons.

Japan has its fair share of candidates, as does India. Indeed, the first position on the US power list is an Indian - Pepsi CEO Indra Nooyi. Then there's the admirable Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, who founded one of Asia's biggest biotech companies, Biocon. There's even a contender from Saudi Arabia, where Lubna Olayan can run a big finance company but not drive a car.

But Australia is always a struggle. For all our enlightened liberal values and fully paid membership of the rich and supposedly egalitarian West, there simply aren't enough women on the higher rungs of corporate Australia to consider.

Many Australian women - and perhaps men in equal number - would view that absence as a crime of national development, particularly in a country that was early to grant female suffrage, before Federation and well before the US and Britain.

But despite that political head start, in a region that has seen 10 women appointed national leader, none of them has been Australian.

The only entrant from Oz on this year's Fortune list is slotted in at No. 29, and she's not even Australian but South African - Westpac's CEO-designate Gail Kelly. This is her first year on the list, picked largely for a job she is yet to do, and partly for one she just did, which was to elevate St George Bank to a $1 billion profit before she was head-hunted. It was a great effort, and was duly acknowledged.

But after Kelly, the mix thins quickly. While Australia has recently exported its male CEOs globally, to Coca-Cola, Ford, McDonald's, Scottish & Newcastle, Scottish Power et al, there are simply not enough women in Australia running major businesses in their absence. There was discussion about Gina Rinehart, Lang Hancock's daughter and, with $4 billion, regarded as Australia's richest woman, and Janet Holmes a Court, head of the company her husband Robert founded. Hard-working though they surely are, it was unclear how "executive" they were, inherited wealth being seen as a little less impressive than the entrepreneurial kind.

The listing rules are that candidates have to manage a sizeable business, with the emphases on their management, their executive role and their independence.

Simply practising the dark arts on myriad establishment boards isn't enough. So Margaret Jackson, the outgoing Qantas chairwoman, and Meredith Hellicar of the carcinogenic James Hardie, don't rate.

Neither does Therese Rein, wife of the Opposition Leader, Kevin Rudd. She may well be about to become Australia's most powerful woman, but that's largely because of who she's married to. Taking her business, Ingeus, as a stand-alone consideration, it was too small globally to cut the mustard (but not small enough not to become a political target).

We could have opted for Katie Page, who co-owns and manages the $2 billion Harvey Norman empire with her husband Gerry Harvey, or Naomi Milgrom, who bought her family out of their fashion chain, Sussans. Maybe we will next year.

So what does all this mean? If it's anything beyond a list acknowledging the achievements of some very impressive people, perhaps it's further fuel for those who think of Australia as blokey and narrow, a place where the term "successful Australian woman" conjures mental images of Kylie, Nicole and Elle.

These are admirable women - and rich and successful, of course - but all from a place that could, but doesn't, for myriad reasons, spawn wealth-creation on a scale of a Meg Whitman of eBay or a Cynthia Carroll of Anglo American, the world's largest mining company, and their myriad sisters smashing the global glass ceiling or, rather, who don't even know that there is one.

Eric Ellis is South-East Asia correspondent for Fortune magazine.