Hello, I’m Jiang Lai.

In the previous episode, we saw that women’s transcripts do not convert into power, and that the problem does not lie in the transcripts themselves. This episode examines what women actually encounter when they enter the workplace, and how those realities relate to policy.

In 2007, American psychologists Alice Eagly and Linda Carli published Through the Labyrinth: The Truth About How Women Become Leaders with Harvard Business School Press.。

They argued that the old and widely circulated “glass ceiling” theory no longer adequately explains why women struggle to become leaders.The key word in glass ceiling is “glass”: the barrier is transparent. You can look up and clearly see the higher position, seemingly within reach, yet you cannot get through. Often you discover the wall only by crashing into it.

But the metaphor has a problem: it places the entire obstacle at the “final step.”It suggests that most of women’s career path is open, and that only at the step nearest power do they suddenly strike a hard glass roof.

Eagly and Carli proposed a new metaphor:what blocks women’s advancement is not a glass wall but an entire labyrinth—its barriers near and far, visible and hidden, its routes branching and winding.

As the previous episode noted, women have received education on a broad scale for little more than a century, and entered public workplaces in large numbers only afterward. When women believe they can climb the career ladder too, they are actually entering a system that leaves them disoriented.

One of the two scholars attended Radcliffe College, Harvard’s former college for women, as an undergraduate; the other taught for many years at Wellesley College. Both have deep ties to women’s colleges, perhaps not by coincidence.

Almost twenty years have passed since the labyrinth metaphor emerged. Recently, The Economist reported that decades of workplace progress for women in developed countries had stalled. Women’s educational attainment is at a historic high, yet their progress at work has not continued upward and has stagnated or even reversed on several measures.。

The situation in China, as many of us can feel, is no more encouraging. In this context, the labyrinth is not merely a problem for women leaders. Its sense of disorientation and attrition aptly describes the wider workplace facing women.

In this episode, we will take that labyrinth apart, chamber by chamber, and examine how each part relates to policy.

Let us begin with business.

Business has a favorite theory among economists: the market is the fairest judge. It does not care who you are, only what numbers you produce. From Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” to Milton Friedman’s claim that a business’s responsibility is to increase profits, the logic sounds impeccable—if you make money, you have succeeded.

But where does the money come from? Today, an entrepreneur’s first funding often comes from investors. In a classic venture-capital study, researchers analyzed line by line the real questions and answers exchanged between 189 entrepreneurs and 140 investors at a startup competition.

They found that investors mostly asked male founders questions such as: How large is your market? How will you win? How far can you grow? The researchers called these“promotion questions,”with keywords such as hope, achievement, and progress.

Women founders were more often asked a different kind: How will you control risk? Can you retain your existing customers? What if you lose money? These were called“prevention questions,”with keywords such as safety, responsibility, and vigilance.

In the experiment, entrepreneurs asked promotion questions received twice as much funding as those asked prevention questions.Follow-up research found that every additional prevention question corresponded to an average reduction of $3.8 million in subsequent funding.。

Industrywide statistics match the study. Crunchbase, a database tracking startups and financing worldwide, examined companies funded between 2009 and 2017. Since 2012, companies founded entirely by women consistently received only about 3% of all venture capital; mixed-gender founding teams received about 7–8%, while all-male teams took about 86–90%.。

The same pitch and the same business plan produce radically different questions and radically different outcomes. Does that not resemble one chamber of a labyrinth? It is hard to identify the exact step where women lose, and no investor will admit to discriminating against women.

The labyrinth does not appear only in fundraising. In 2026, the World Economic Forum published a report on the gender gap in senior corporate leadership. Women held about a quarter of top executive positions, but fewer than one in five CEO roles.

The difference becomes clearer when we examine which seats they occupy. Women are about two thirds of chief human resources and chief talent officers, and nearly half of chief marketing officers. But in finance and operations—roles commonly treated as paths to the CEO position—they are only about one quarter. Among chief technology officers, they are just 8.6%.。

Women are therefore not wholly excluded from senior leadership, but are concentrated in human resources, talent, and marketing, and appear less often in the core functions controlling finance, operations, and technology. Every route exists in the labyrinth, yet some lead to the center of power while others, however far one follows them, seldom reach the CEO’s office.

Does policy play a role in this chamber?At least when these decisive judgments are made, policy has difficulty entering.What investors ask, whom companies judge to have potential, and who enters finance, operations, or technology are ordinarily treated as market choices or internal organizational arrangements. Unless explicit evidence of discrimination remains, it is difficult to identify a violated rule or anyone who must take responsibility.

Yet the absence of policy is itself an influence.Some countries have begun intervening through another entrance—not by dictating investors’ questions, but by directly changing the gender composition of companies’ highest decision-making bodies.

In 2003, Norway became the first country to legislate that women must hold at least 40% of listed-company board seats, with noncompliant companies subject to compulsory dissolution. The European Union proposed a similar measure as early as 2012, but it remained blocked among member states for a decade before passing in 2022, with large listed companies required to comply by 2026. Policy cannot dictate investors’ questions, but it can open a door in the labyrinth.

Now let us look elsewhere: academia. If business hides behind the veil of the “invisible hand,” academia may be the world’s most measurable domain. Papers published, impact factors, grants won, citation counts—all are supposedly objective indicators. Gender should matter least here. The result is counterintuitive: this is where women disappear with the greatest regularity.

The previous episode introduced the term “leaky pipeline”: women, like water, become fewer the farther they travel up the pipe.

But the phrase “leaky pipeline” obscures human agency. One woman scholar I interviewed spent nineteen years moving from associate professor to full professor. She loved teaching, but because evaluation prioritized research over teaching, her teaching achievements did not even qualify for consideration.

Her turning point came from a policy in academia:the campaign to “break the five onlys.”The five onlys describe an evaluation system that looked almost exclusively at five things: papers, professional titles, academic credentials, awards, and elite-talent “hats.” How many papers a scholar published and which titles she held nearly decided whether she could become a professor; the quality of her teaching and care for students barely registered.

Around 2020, the state began promoting reform of the five onlys and loosening these rigid standards. That opening led her university to create, as an exception, one position for a teaching-track professor. She finally received promotion and remains the only person in that position at the university.

Another woman teacher had outstanding research. She failed promotion the first time. The next year, her department chair told her that a male deputy chair hoped to secure a professorship before retiring but did not meet the standard; if she competed, he would not succeed. She said, “I didn’t see the point,” and withdrew. In the third year, colleagues protested the unfairness and she applied, finally receiving the overdue title. She repeatedly insisted that gender was irrelevant—the issue was favors, relationships, and balancing interests within the department.

I do not doubt her sincerity. But consider the situation another way:would it have unfolded the same way if the colleague blocking her had been a woman, or if she had been a promising young man?

This posture is common among accomplished women: they carefully deny gender’s influence, whether negative or positive. Admitting to a supposed “gender dividend” seems to dilute their achievement; to reject that implication, they also avert their eyes from gender’s disadvantages.

What about policy? In academia, policy is present. In 2010, the National Natural Science Foundation of China introduced preferential treatment for women: applicants to its Young Scientists Fund could be up to forty, compared with thirty-five for men. In 2021, thirteen government departments jointly encouraged nominations of women scientists for academy membership and preferential support for women under equal conditions.

Yet another woman scholar I interviewed was frequently invited to serve as an evaluator after becoming a full professor. She often found herself the only woman on the panel.She had indeed seen language such as “give preference to women” in evaluation instructions, but in practice the pool of women candidates was often so small that there was no one to favor.In her words, the policy existed only on paper.

This is academia’s chamber of the labyrinth. The numbers are public, the rules explicit, and preference policies even exist. But at decisive moments, detailed mechanisms must ensure that policy actually governs who is nominated, which achievements count, and what contributions are recognized.

The 2023 academicians elected from the 2021 selection process numbered 133, only six of them women; among the Chinese Academy of Engineering’s seventy-four new members, only one was a woman. Without target shares, nomination mechanisms, accountability, and procedural transparency, “preference under equal conditions” can be little more than a gesture.

Incidentally, another counterintuitive fact: Cuba, also a socialist country, has the world’s highest share of women academy members, at 34%.We will discuss that in detail later, in the chapter comparing global policies.

For our final chamber, let us turn to politics.

This domain differs from the first two. Business lacks policy, while academic policy is fragmented and weak. Politics initially looks forceful: it has policy, and a tool commonly used worldwide—gender quotas for women in politics.。

The international Gender Quotas Database records gender-quota arrangements in parliamentary elections, a routine tool many countries use to correct imbalances in political representation.In China, however, for more than a decade after the turn of the century, this policy circulated within the system in the guise of a joke:“the ignorant young woman.”That was its name.

Younger listeners may not know the phrase today, but it was once insider slang understood both inside and outside the bureaucracy.In Chinese, each character stood for an identity: non-Party, intellectual, ethnic minority, and woman.The implication was that during leadership reshuffles, someone combining these identities was especially convenient for appointment to a leadership team, satisfying several structural-representation requirements at once—a Chinese form of quotas.

Although women were only one of four categories, the quota policy had an important origin and later exercised unprecedented influence on women’s advancement in politics.

In 1995, Beijing hosted the Fourth World Conference on Women, one of the largest global conferences in UN history. Representatives from 189 countries came to Beijing and more than 17,000 attended the official conference. At the welcoming ceremony, President Jiang Zemin committed China to making equality between women and men a basic state policy for social development. That same year, the Central Organization Department set a rule: by 2000, every provincial leadership team must include at least one woman cadre, with the same requirement at prefectural, municipal, county, and township levels.

At the turn of the century, the state policy and quota were implemented as expressions of national will. Their intellectual foundation came from the Beijing Platform for Action and its concept of gender mainstreaming.

The starting point was admirable: a field of power long occupied by men finally had a visible rule—each leadership team must contain at least one woman cadre.

Yet the problem lay precisely in “at least one.”Here Chinese wording becomes subtle. “At least” should establish a floor: no fewer than one. In practice it easily became a minimum box to check. Once a team had one woman, its gender “quota” was deemed satisfied. The floor became the ceiling, while remaining formally compliant.

More complicated still, that one woman was ideally expected to satisfy more than the “woman” quota.Leadership composition also required non-Party figures, intellectuals, and ethnic minorities. Positions were limited and requirements numerous. A woman who was non-Party, had an intellectual background, and perhaps belonged to an ethnic minority became the perfect appointee, satisfying several indicators alone.

The pun “ignorant young woman” emerged from this setting. Compressing four identity categories into a clever abbreviation, it revealed a quota system gone astray: a woman was not entering the power structure simply as a representative of her gender, but was placed where needed at the intersection of multiple identities.

The phrase followed a clear path into public circulation. An early public example came in 2011, when Zeng Xiaoyuan, a candidate for the Tianhe District People’s Congress in Guangzhou, was called an “ignorant young woman” at a voter meeting. She corrected the speaker on the spot: she was actually a “knowledgeable woman.”By 2011, then, the phrase was no longer confined to government offices; outsiders used it readily.

Around 2013–2015 it reached a media peak. After the Eighteenth Party Congress, leadership transitions, appointments, and anticorruption all became public topics, and commentary began running headlines about changes among “ignorant young women” in politics or their presence in think tanks. Around 2014, media compiled data on principal and deputy provincial leaders across thirty-one provincial-level regions: 241 men and thirty women. More than 90% of those women met at least two of the four identity conditions.。The phrase became hottest precisely when the public was scrutinizing leadership composition, women’s promotion, and the role of identity qualifications in advancement.

What this episode truly exposed was not that quotas themselves were wrong, but that the quota had not gone far enough to change the structure.International discussions of women’s political representation often invoke a “critical mass.” Developed through research since the 1980s on women’s political participation in the Nordic countries, the idea later merged with the UN system’s target of 30% women in decision-making.。

A 30% critical mass means that only when a long-minoritized group reaches that share can it escape extreme isolation, support its members, build an agenda, and influence decisions.Below that threshold, an isolated woman leader must devote her effort to fitting the system and surviving in office; outsiders regard her as an exception or decoration, of little consequence.

Requiring “at least one woman cadre” did bring women into leadership teams, but remained far from the 30% threshold. How can a team’s only woman build power, enter decisive posts, or influence real decisions? Those questions went unanswered.

Chinese research confirms the theory, suggesting that China is not exceptional. A 2014 study used samples of senior talent from the Survey on the Social Status of Women in China. When women made up at least 30% of an organization’s leadership, gender discrimination declined markedly in hiring, promotion, job assignment, and retirement. Below 30%, however, improvement over all-male leadership was not significant.。

A recent survey experiment in Public Administration Review illustrates the issue too. Researchers separated women’s political representation into two dimensions: whether women were present numerically, and whether they substantively advanced women’s concerns. Women respondents felt least politically effective not when women decision-makers were few, but when their numbers rose without meaningful action for women. Representation that stops at women’s mere presence may therefore fail to inspire and even convince ordinary women that entering the room changes nothing.。

Yet after the quota revealed itself as too small, too soft, and too easily reduced to a label, policy moved not toward firmer targets and accountability, but in the opposite direction.

In 2019, the National Plan for Building Party and Government Leadership Teams replaced the language on women cadres with the flexible phrase “reasonable allocation.” In 2021, the State Council’s new Outline for Women’s Development in China (2021–2030) dropped the previous version’s “one or more” and substituted “fill every appropriate post.”

Once numbers disappeared, women’s political advancement fell back into the cadre-selection procedure institutionalized since the mid-1990s: democratic recommendation, organizational inspection, public recognition, and comprehensive assessment. The formula sounds familiar. Who recommends democratically? What does the organization inspect? Which public grants recognition, and of what? Who conducts the comprehensive assessment and who decides? None of these four gates can be measured with a ruler.

We saw the same formula in business: no rule constrains investors’ questions, so the same presenter is asked whether she will lose money. We saw it in academia: papers and grants are hard indicators, but evaluators still decide which achievements count and which contributions cannot be recognized.

Now in politics, assessments, tenure, and qualifications are clear standards. Women accumulate those credentials step by step precisely to become eligible for leadership.However imperfect, the earlier quota was at least a hard indicator on which they could rely. Without it, women face an entire system that cannot be explained or questioned—once again, a labyrinth.

After this turning point, the phrase “ignorant young woman” changed habitats. It appeared less in serious political reporting and more on Zhihu, civil-service-exam media, and insider career posts. Discussion shifted from “Is so-and-so an ignorant young woman?” to “Is it true that they are promoted quickly?” and “Does the rule still count?” It even became an exam-preparation fact.

Young people may know nothing of the 1995 World Conference on Women or the 2001 cadre-composition document, yet first learn from test-preparation material an identity combination: non-Party, intellectual, ethnic minority, and woman—together nicknamed the “ignorant young woman.”

Official policy and popular language, we discover, moved together:as policy softened, public discussion began asking whether the quota still worked at all.

The real-world outcome is stark. The twenty-four-member Politburo elected at the Twentieth Party Congress in 2022 included no women, breaking a twenty-year convention: every Politburo since 2002 had included at least one woman full member. Wu Yi, Liu Yandong, and Sun Chunlan had each occupied that rare but visible seat. No woman has ever sat on the Politburo Standing Committee. Of the Twentieth Central Committee’s 205 full members, only eleven, or 5.4%, were women; among the top leaders of China’s thirty-one provincial-level regions, women have long been extremely rare.

That is the policy history behind the phrase “ignorant young woman.” It reflects not merely the fortunes of a phrase, but the fate of a policy:born when a country needed to demonstrate progress to the world, it began with a clear number and then, amid silence from both opponents and defenders, retreated into a statement for which no one need be accountable.

We must distinguish the flawed form of the quota from the women who entered leadership through it. The policy did promote a group of women cadres, and they accomplished real things in office. They are not the problem.

As critical-mass theory reminds us, one person’s power remains one person’s power. Being heard in a roomful of people, advancing an issue concerning women, or defending an unpopular view at a decisive moment never depends on individual ability and will alone. Today’s situation makes that plain:they came and they tried, but no cohort followed behind them.

After crossing these three chambers, we can finally look back and ask how the labyrinth was built.

Business investors hold an image of a “successful founder.” Academic panels hold an image of a “leading scholar.” Behind an organization department’s “public recognition” stands an image of what a “leading cadre” should be.

From bottom to top, the workplace follows the same logic: the ideal employee never takes maternity leave and is always available for overtime; the ideal leader is decisive, tough, and commanding; the ideal elite has been called a “genius” since boyhood.

Women do not first meet this labyrinth near the top; it begins when they leave school and submit their first résumé. At entry level it disguises itself as “this job may not suit a woman.” In middle management it becomes “she lacks a little boldness.” At the top it becomes the unanswerable judgment that she “lacks sufficient public recognition.”

The hardest gate at the summit is connected to the circumstances of ordinary women at lower and middle levels. By the World Bank’s measure, women’s labor-force participation in China fell from 79% in 1990 to 69% in 2019. It remains above the world average, but the trend is downward.

As the base contracts, the pyramid’s peak becomes harder to sustain. The declining share of women leaders and the fall in women’s overall employment are different points on the same curve.That downward curve again reveals how policy shapes women’s circumstances. A woman’s place at work is never determined entirely by her; it is also determined by what the state needs from her at different times.

When labor was needed, women were mobilized into production on a large scale and employment rose. As growth slowed and population structure became a new concern, expectations shifted back toward women’s family roles and reproductive function. Women’s ability did not change; what changed was where the arranging hand of each era wanted to place them.