Asia is quite the gender paradox, a world leader in sexism despite empowering more female leaders — in Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines, South Korea, Sri Lanka and Thailand, with Aung San Suu Kyi now de facto ruler of Myanmar — than any other region. That includes China, where Soong Ching Ling served as honorary president in the early 1980s.
The United Nations estimates that failure to accommodate female talent costs Asia about $89 billion a year in squandered output. It's as bad as economics gets: a region looking to raise a few billion out of poverty blowing the annual gross domestic product of Ecuador on retrograde gender mores.
We're talking not just developing countries but Asia's most powerful economies perceived as getting misogyny in check. When Park Geun-hye became president in 2013, for example, South Korea ranked 111th on the World Economic Forum's annual gender gap report. Today, her economy is 115th, trailing Burkina Faso and Maldives. Japan moved up to 101st from 111th when Shinzo Abe began his premiership in 2012. But while more Japanese women are entering the workforce they're falling further behind in wage equality, access to managerial jobs and numbers in technical fields.