Women are the future of the global workforce

Gillian Daley/ Contributing Writer

She has exploded onto the scene; hard lines of determination are etched into her face and she stands, well composed, with a hand on each hip. Her brows are furrowed in concentration, and she’s sheathed in her most powerful pantsuit. She is the face of the future. Women are steadily beginning to supersede their male counterparts in the workforce.

Since the late 1970’s, the number of women in offices and corporate headquarters has risen like a tidal wave. At first, there was less than 40 percent of women who decided to take up an occupation, and most took on subservient roles in the office, working as either secretaries or typists.

Today, American women aren’t just striving to bridge the workforce gap — they’re doing it.  Although the number of female CEOs isn’t reflective of this — women business leaders account for  less than 3 percent of the fortune 500 — we may be on the brink of a woman-lead workplace revolution.

The number of women who graduate college has skyrocketed — among adults 25 and older, 10.6 million U.S. women have master’s degrees or higher, compared to 10.5 million men, according to CBS News.

Studies show that when more women are given the opportunity to have an education, join the workforce and add to the fecundity of her community, the society as a whole reaps the fruits of her labour, according to The Economist and Harvard Business Law Review.

This is not just a Western phenomenon — more women across the globe are entering the workplace en masse.

In the early 1990’s, the economic development of Chinese women took a nosedive culturally. Cultural ideals and standards for women went from a hardworking equal to a mother, a wife and a figure of feminine beauty. Thus, gender equality organizations and activists in the mid-2000s became the re-employment of former working women and employment of young women.

As a result, we can observe a burgeoning generation of Chinese women who go to work despite rampant gender-based discrimination and stigma of  terms like Sheng Nu or “Left Over Women,” which were popularized to further ostracize and humiliate girls who chose education and economic independence over marriage and motherhood.

Despite this unyielding societal  refrain that Chinese women should stay home, a chorus of courageous women join the workforce each year, serving in industrial plants and businesses.

Women are rising and getting jobs they deserve and work hard for. They are taking up arms against economic dependency and they’re fighting against financial uncertainty and putting their futures into their own hands. The future is female.

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