Mao Zedong once declared: “Women hold up half the sky,” but today’s Chinese Communist Party is heavy with testosterone and when a new set of leaders is announced this week all are expected to be male.
About a quarter of the delegates at the party congress under way in Beijing are women, but the meeting largely rubberstamps decisions already made behind closed doors and the higher up the echelons of real power, the more their ranks thin.
The ruling party’s influential Central Committee has 6 per cent women, the more senior 25-member Politburo has only one, Liu Yandong, and China’s most powerful body the Politburo Standing Committee has never had any.
Analysts attribute women’s lower representation to traditional Chinese mindsets and social structures, and a male-dominated political culture infamous late-night drinking and mistresses.
“There’s definitely this old boys’ club in Chinese politics that works against women,” said Leta Hong Fincher, a doctoral candidate researching gender at Tsinghua University in Beijing.
Earlier this year the state news agency Xinhua carried a report acknowledging that women faced “subcultures of Chinese officialdom like drinking alcohol” that “make it difficult for women to integrate”.
