“I never use the advantage, or we call it disadvantage, as a woman while at work with my male colleagues,” says Dong Mingzhu, President of China’s Gree Electric Appliances, the top-selling air-conditioning manufacturer in the world, at a Women CEO Forum of the Global Summit of Women 2008 in Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam on Saturday.
“I see no difference between women and men at work…I don’t ask for special treatment because I’m a woman. Gender is not important in business. What’s important is decisiveness, judgment, and action,” says the strong-minded lady, joined by hundreds of other female delegates, who packed the grand ballroom of the Melia Hotel in the downtown area of Hanoi.
The women from about 70 countries, many dressed up in exquisite and colorful traditional clothes, were discussing secrets to career success, and the different working performance between men and women.
Sophia Tong, General Manager of IBM in China’s Taiwan, considers loving, caring and considerateness as special gifts for women, which help them deal with things in a more gentle and easily-to-be-accepted way. She also believes women are good at multi-tasking, which enables them to handle different things properly at the same time.
However, she believes that women, especially Asian women, are not as bold as men, thus letting good chances to slip away from their fingers.
“You need to think big, and then take action,” she suggests.
Yasmin Mahmood, Managing Director for Microsoft Malaysia, describes women’s roles as “jogging plates in the air”, like Chinese acrobats, without one plate falling to the ground. “This amazing versatility enables women to move quickly from one style to another. It’s everyone’s, not just women’s responsibility to help women to transform.”
In order to become a successful woman in career, Sophia asks all women at the forum to “go global”, to gain multiple capabilities, and “most important of all, have a clear self-awareness, to know yourself well, to know what kind of person you are, and what you really want. ”
The six panelists, all of them leaders of their respective companies, agree that they are still working in a man-dominant working environment, and it’s very rare for a woman to climb to a top position.
Ann Sherry, CEO of Carnival Australia, says that in her company’s decades of history, only two women have managed to “climb” to the CEO position, including her.
Yukako Uchinaga, CEO of Berlitz International in Japan, says the top-ranking women in Japanese companies are still rare species, while the middle-level female managers are more and more commonly seen.
“Sometimes you’ll have to wait five, or ten years to move from the middle to the top, and many women stop trying during the process,” Yukako adds, “So my advice is: don’t give up!”
On personalities for a women to succeed in career life, Dong says she believes that passion and confidence are the two vital personalities in a woman’s career life. “Passion and confidence will make a woman love the job and be happy,” she says.