Winning the War for Talent in Emerging Markets. Sylvia Ann Hewlett

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      Pronina still remembers the moment when she realized that her career horizons had no limits. “I really did not believe that coming from a very low level I had a real chance to make it rapidly. But at my first annual performance assessment, I suddenly understood I could be recognized and could do well. That was the turning point for me.”

      Today, Pronina oversees fourteen direct reports and four hundred contractors as facilities and services team manager for Russia/CIS at Intel. Her ambition is to stay with her employer—and do even more. “My employer is doing a lot for my development and provides almost everything I would like to have. I would like to stay at this company but be responsible not only for Russia and CIS but also Europe.”

      Talented women in emerging markets are ahead of the curve in unexpected ways. Like Pronina, they see work not as a stopgap measure to fill the time between marriage and motherhood but as an opportunity to realize their ambitions.

      This chapter explores the remarkable combination of advantages that talented women in emerging markets bring to the workplace: impressive qualifications, ambitious career visions, and great passion and commitment to their work.

      EDUCATIONAL EXCELLENCE

      The World Economic Forum's 2010 Annual Gender Gap Report tracks gender parity for 134 countries along four dimensions: education, health, economic participation and opportunities, and political empowerment.¹ In the BRIC countries and the UAE, the overall gender gap has consistently narrowed, and this shift is most apparent in education.

      Interestingly, the spark for many women was triggered by their parents, who recognized the value of an education in a changing world and encouraged their daughters to excel in their studies, either at home or abroad. For many families, like Hiroo Mirchandani's, educational achievement was expected of children of both sexes. “We were brought up measured on how we did in school,” recalls Mirchandani, who grew up in New Delhi. “It didn't matter if you were a boy or a girl. What was expected was that you came at the top of the class.”

      Other parents pushed their daughters to overcome their own shortcomings through education. Woman after woman in our focus groups and interviews had a story similar to Lisandra Ambrozio's. When Ambrozio's mother was a girl, her dream was to learn English. Her mother, however, wanted her daughter to learn to play the piano. Ambrozio's mother grudgingly studied piano for twelve years—“She hated it,” Ambrozio recalls—until she married. “And she never played the piano again.” But she never forgot her resentment at being denied the chance to learn another language, and as soon as Ambrozio could read, her mother asked whether she'd like to take English classes. When Ambrozio said yes, her mother was overjoyed. “Great!” Ambrozio remembers her exclaiming. “I'm going to pay for your English courses myself, because I think this will be good for your career and your personal life.” As a result, Ambrozio was fluent in English before she went to Pontificia Universidade Catolica, Brazil's top private university, where she received her undergraduate degree and MBA.

      Ambrozio's father also supported her educational aspirations. Ambrozio's dream was to take a year-long extension course at the University of California, Berkeley. “I was working and saving money for a couple of years,” Ambrozio says, but when she finally accumulated enough money to pay for the course and her living expenses, Brazil suffered a massive currency devaluation. Half of her savings were wiped out. Ambrozio's father hadn't been happy about the prospect of his daughter's leaving the country, but he knew how much it meant to her. “He said, ‘Okay, you pay for half of the course and I'll pay for the other.’ Greeeeat father!” Ambrozio exclaims.

      Today, Ambrozio is the human resources director for Pfizer, Brazil. Her brother is a civil engineer, and her sister is a lawyer. Ambrozio has never forgotten her father's action or what it represented. “This is one of the most admirable things that my father did,” she muses. “He invested in our education.”

      This groundswell of expectation, encouragement, and support from both parents endorses one of our most striking findings: that women are flooding into university and graduate schools in record numbers. Just as in the United States, where women college graduates now outnumber men, there is an “achievement gap” in three of our target geographies: women represent 65 percent of college graduates in the UAE, 60 percent in Brazil, and in China they are already 47 percent of this group (see figure 1-1).

FIGURE 1-1

      Percent of women in tertiary education

      Source: World Bank Education Statistics Database.

      It is no surprise that in Russia, where Communism promoted universal access to education, 86 percent of women aged eighteen to twenty-three are enrolled in tertiary education—compared with 64 percent of men the same age—and the numbers in the other BRIC markets are also impressive.² More than one-third of women in the appropriate age group in Brazil and the UAE are enrolled in tertiary education, a percentage notably larger than that of their male counterparts.

      In China and India, with far larger and less urbanized populations, the overall percentage of women in this age group enrolled in colleges and universities is lower—23 percent and 10 percent, respectively—but the interesting story is who has the determination to go beyond the initial diploma. Half the Indian women in our sample hold graduate degrees, outstripping men by 10 percentage points, and the number of Chinese women with graduate degrees is virtually equal to the number of Chinese men. As one of the women we interviewed explained, “There was a time in India when people saved up money for their daughter's marriage or for their son's education, but the urban middle-class community in India doesn't do that anymore. Today, for a son or a daughter, the priority is education.”

      The BRIC/UAE education figures are impressive also in their sheer scale, because the actual number of university graduates in these countries has increased at a phenomenal rate. Thanks to the rapid expansion in the number of institutions of higher education, an area that has experienced reinvigorated government and private sector focus in recent years, higher education enrollment in China has more than tripled since 2000, and the number of doctoral degrees awarded annually rose sevenfold between 1996 and 2006.³ In India, the number of universities has doubled since 1990, and the government has committed to boosting higher education spending ninefold, to $20 billion annually in the five-year period that began in 2007. This colossal investment will be directed toward seventy-two new postsecondary schools, including eight new Indian Institutes of Technology, seven new Indian Institutes of Management, five new Indian Institutes of Science, Education and Research, and twenty new Indian Institutes of Information Technology.⁴

      The broadening access to higher education has been paralleled by vast improvements in the quality of education available in BRIC countries and the UAE. It's no secret that the quality of BRIC and UAE university graduates has been uneven, to say the least, with many degree holders unprepared to succeed in a competitive multinational environment. Each year, for instance, India produces as many young engineers as the United States, and Russia graduates ten times as many finance and accounting professionals as Germany; yet the McKinsey Global Institute estimates that a mere 25 percent of professionals in India and 20 percent in Russia are top-quality, “ready” talent; similarly, in China it is estimated that fewer than one in ten university graduates is prepared to succeed in a multinational environment.⁵ Until very recently, the smartest students in developing economies sought entry to the most prestigious universities in the United States and Western Europe.

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