Meet the women succeeding in male-dominated industries in China
Kou Aizhe from Story FM: In 2011, I was working in the Beijing office of a European company, listening to my boss chat about her recent business trip to Japan. She recalled how they hired a charter driver, and how she (the driver) took them to many interesting but dangerous places.
Because of the pronoun, I blurted out, “Wow, I can’t believe a female driver did all that!”
My boss instantly stopped talking. She demanded, quite angrily, “What do you mean? Can’t women drive?”
She had a point. Why was I so fixated on the driver’s gender? Were female drivers truly that rare? Did my choice of words—“female driver”—reflect the common pejorative view that women are bad at driving?
There’s a first time for everything, including deconstructing your own vision of gender. It’s an ongoing process, for sure, but I am working on it.
Recently at Story FM, we’ve been gathering stories from our audience, particularly from our female listeners. Many of these women have charted their own paths in challenging, typically male-dominated industries. They’ve got every reason to boast, and their testimonies are as impressive as they are diverse: sailors, firefighters, military R&D, AI-assisted manufacturing; you name it.
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