Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to HSBC Global Viewpoint, the podcast series that brings together business leaders and industry experts to explore the latest global insights, trends, and opportunities.
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Speaker: Hello and welcome to Under the Banyan Tree, where we put Asian markets and economics in context.
Speaker: I'm your host, Harold van der Linde, here in the Hong Kong studio with my guest host and fellow equity strategist, Pruna Gark.
Speaker: We recently worked on a report together that's the focus of today's podcast.
Speaker: Pruna, over to you.
Speaker: Thanks, Harold.
Speaker: Today, we're talking about women in the workplace across Asia.
Speaker: There is a lot of under-representation but also a lot of potential for mobilization which could help drive industries and growth.
Speaker: From HHPC Global Research, you're listening to Under the Banyan Tree.
Speaker: A few customary stats to get the ball rolling on today's discussion.
Speaker: Only 30% of women in India are actually in the workforce.
Speaker: And when we look at leadership roles, their proportion is even smaller.
Speaker: On the flip side, mainland China and Vietnam have much higher female participation rates at 60 and 70% respectively.
Speaker: Across Asia, we've seen a 40% increase in women in the labour force between 1991 and 2021.
Speaker: And we can see the impact of that when we look at the consumer numbers.
Speaker: Ultimately, we think up to 300 million additional women could join the Asian workforce in the years ahead.
Speaker: And we'll come to how we can get there.
Speaker: So, Prerna, if we talk about demographics in Asia, very often it's pretty alarmist.
Speaker: Birth rates are plummeting.
Speaker: Societies are crumbling under the weight of aging.
Speaker: In certain countries, people wonder if there will be anybody left at all by the end of the century.
Speaker: So it's all very, very negative.
Speaker: But there are positive trends as well, right?
Speaker: Yes, and one I can think about is how more women in Asia, they're joining the labor force.
Speaker: If we dive deeper into it, there are countries like mainland China or Vietnam, where a very high proportion of women are in the labor force.
Speaker: In fact, the number is much higher than the work, than the global averages.
Speaker: But again, there are regions like say Indonesia or India, where very few are yet in the labor force, but this trend is changing very fast.
Speaker: Yeah, and I think India is actually quite low on that,
Speaker: It's slow because of two reasons.
Speaker: One, generally women don't get equal opportunities towards education and also there are cultural reasons at place.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: So education seems to be one particular thing.
Speaker: People need to have the skills to work, right?
Speaker: And there have been investments across the region in education.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: For example, India has this policy which is called beti bachau, beti padhaau, which means save the daughter, educate the daughter.
Speaker: And these policies are focused around providing more education opportunities to women.
Speaker: In Philippines, it's quite the opposite.
Speaker: If we look at the stats, we see that in general, women end up getting more formal education than men.
Speaker: But overall, this gap is more biased towards men.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So let's talk about the Philippines in a second.
Speaker: But so these women get better educated.
Speaker: Let's think about India in that case.
Speaker: Then if we look at the pay levels, they're not as good as men as they get a job.
Speaker: Because there are a few industries.
Speaker: Think of manufacturing.
Speaker: Think about hospitality where women end up getting more roles.
Speaker: than say investment banking or tech.
Speaker: And it's generally these latter industries which are higher paying.
Speaker: So overall, there is the gender pay gap that exists that women in general are not paid as well as men are.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And but also they're more into lower paying jobs than men in general.
Speaker: But there are some nice examples of companies that really try to make a difference.
Speaker: So I know of a dairy company in Indonesia that has a distribution network that is all female and that women literally taking yogurt and milk from small villages on bicycles and stuff like that and distributing it out.
Speaker: And they only work at women and it's about one seventh of their total distribution and it's much more productive, they told me.
Speaker: This is interesting because I can think of similar examples from India.
Speaker: There are many automobile companies where the manufacturing lines are run 100% by women.
Speaker: And it's a part of their policy that they want lines which are just like, you know, women centric where women take care of the whole supply chain.
Speaker: So yes, like, you know, with time, we see that more and more companies are very focused on having more women in the labor force.
Speaker: So that's good.
Speaker: But what we then want to see is that women get more and more into decision making processes.
Speaker: Which is still a problem.
Speaker: Like, you know, and we spoke about how in mainland China, women employment is higher.
Speaker: But if we focus on these higher paying jobs that we just discussed about and also the managerial position, women are massively underrepresented.
Speaker: But here again there are like you know in Philippines 50% of the population in the managerial roles are women or in Malaysia one third of the corporate cabinet is formed by women.
Speaker: So there are markets or there are countries within Asia where these trends are not as bad as generally they we perceive them to be.
Speaker: But in general I would say more women are joining the labour force but we need more smarter policies to accelerate this trend.
Speaker: Yeah, so we need more policies because, well, we did this report and some people say, but how can women work more and have more babies if that's the problem that we alluded to in the beginning?
Speaker: So we need smarter policies whereby they can combine these two, right?
Speaker: Right, for example, like, you know, a lot of policies today are focused on just providing one-time generous cash handouts to women so that they can have more children.
Speaker: But to be honest, like, you know, raising a kid doesn't come with one-time expenses.
Speaker: No.
Speaker: The policies need to be focused on in general bringing down the cost of childcare.
Speaker: It could be done by like, you know, moderating the education prices or like, you know, we often talk about providing women with generous maternity leaves, but it's not just the role of women to have a family, right?
Speaker: Like, you know, we need to have more parental leaves need to be provided.
Speaker: So you need a lower cost of education.
Speaker: We need low cost of childcare.
Speaker: We need more flexible working arrangements.
Speaker: But not only for women, but also for the men so that they can both help out.
Speaker: So these policies cannot work in vacuum.
Speaker: They cannot work in silo.
Speaker: You need to have like, you know, more combined policies together that focus on having more women in labor force, but at the same time, making sure that this does not come at the cost of lower fertility rates.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: Now, I suggest we take a quick break here and then we're going to go and see how this impacts actually how people spend money across the region.
Speaker: Let's do that.
Speaker: So we're back here with Pruna to talk about the role of women in labor markets, in economies in Asia, and the sort of policies that we required.
Speaker: We just spoke about this.
Speaker: Now, it means if women work, they have more money to spend than their mother did or their grandmother did, right?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: It increases their spending capacity.
Speaker: So we see women are now spending more on clothing, on cosmetics, on footwear.
Speaker: They are a bigger consumer group for automobile companies.
Speaker: For example, in India, the automobile sales for women, they have increased by 4x in the last 10 years.
Speaker: So they buy more cars.
Speaker: So they buy more cars.
Speaker: So they buy more cars.
Speaker: But I think...
Speaker: If you're not mistaken, you told me this, they buy more EVs, right?
Speaker: They buy more EVs.
Speaker: And we see that trend in mainland China and India, where they are a bigger consumer group for EV companies.
Speaker: And then they're traveling more.
Speaker: They're spending more on gaming.
Speaker: We see that trend in mainland China.
Speaker: Six out of 10 travelers last year in 2023 were women.
Speaker: So as women, they have more money.
Speaker: They are spending on a range of products for themselves.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: And there are certain products where they spend on more than men, you could say, or they emphasize a little bit more.
Speaker: But I think also this helps, for example, to bridge the Internet gap because it's a growing force on the Internet spending.
Speaker: So, like, you know, if we compare within Asia, the...
Speaker: Access to smartphones or access to internet, it's much lower to women than in, say, mainland China or Taiwan.
Speaker: So as that is improving, as women have, as they earn more, they're buying more smartphones.
Speaker: So they are available online.
Speaker: And a lot of this consumption just happens via online e-commerce companies.
Speaker: So that must be good business for them in that sense.
Speaker: And at the same time, Harold, if we look at other domain, for example, financial decision making, education attainment, health care.
Speaker: In the past, a lot of this spending on these three streams, they were coming from men.
Speaker: But we see that now women are spending more on self-care, on getting themselves educated, on attaining better health.
Speaker: They're spending more on cosmetic products.
Speaker: So there are these range of companies that are like, you know, for whom women are becoming a bigger consumer group now.
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: I think one of the statistics is that in the book sort of industry, selling books, that there's a disproportionate number of women that drive that growth in that particular market.
Speaker: We also see that as women marry later, that's another demographic trend, we have more single households, right?
Speaker: And they spend differently as well.
Speaker: They spend very differently.
Speaker: Instead of preparing an elaborate meal at home, they probably prefer to go to the next convenience store and just buy a ready-to-eat meal.
Speaker: They need a smaller house to live in than say like a three-bedroom or four-bedroom apartment.
Speaker: So the needs for this single consumer group is a little different from how a traditional family consumes.
Speaker: So just for me then to step back here, we see demographic shifts and policies gradually being put in place that allow more women to work and participate in labor.
Speaker: Very good trend, but there's a long way to go for full participation, but so it is.
Speaker: And we see that that actually shifts consumer trends in Asia as well.
Speaker: For example, more as you said, convenience stores, but also they tend to buy cars differently or books and all sorts of other products and do more on the internet as well.
Speaker: At least they didn't do as much as men and now they do so.
Speaker: So they're catching up.
Speaker: So that's a growth area.
Speaker: So it shifts and changes all these consumer markets in Asia.
Speaker: It's really interesting, right?
Speaker: It is.
Speaker: But again, as we discussed, like, you know, in the first half, we need more policies in place so that this trend can become even bigger.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So I suspect we need to come back on this particular topic in due course to see if these positive trends, albeit quite slowly, continue to move in the right direction.
Speaker: And that's about all we've got time for this week.
Speaker: Thanks for joining us.
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Speaker: From all of us here in Hong Kong, all the very best.
Speaker: And we'll talk to you again next week.
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Speaker: We hope you enjoyed the discussion.
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