The New Female Economies in China and the Muslim World

In China and the Muslim world, rising numbers of women in the workforce are revolutionizing their cultures and their economies. Two new books explore what futures these transformations promise.

FEATURING

• Roseann Lake, journalist and author of Leftover in China: the Women Shaping the World's Next Superpower


• Saadia Zahidi, Head of Education, Gender and Work at the World Economic Forum and author of Fifty Million Rising: the New Generation of Working Women Revolutionizing the Muslim World


• Rana Foroohar, Global Economic Analyst for CNN and Global Business Columnist for the Financial Times

Across the Muslim world, women are entering the workforce at unprecedented speed. "Imagine if the United States had been transformed in just a few years from the era of the 'Femine Mystique' in the 1960s to the 'Lean-In' era of the 2010s," Saadia Zahidi writes in Fifty Million Rising. "Businesses and policymakers are starting to notice, and what they do next will guide some of the most important change the Muslim world has ever seen." Meanwhile, in China, where not long ago "marriage was universal, compulsory, and a woman's only  means to livelihood," the world's largest population of women is "entering the white-collar workforce in numbers that rival and surpass those of men." In Leftover in China, Roseann Lake asks how the demands of career development—which often include delaying, or forgoing, marriage—are reconcilable with traditions that consider unmarried woman over the age of 30 to be  "leftover."

In parts of the planet with which American fortunes are so intextricably tied, how are the new female economies remaking the future for us all?

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