Life and Leisure
Sorority strength
By Wang Wei (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-08-25 13:36
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Pan Yinghan (middle), Sun Lingyi (second from right) and other founding members of Seven Sisters in China. Zou Hong / China Daily |
A determined group of Chinese students in the US is hoping to convince well-qualified peers to put their education to better use than as trophy wives and mistresses, Wang Wei reports
Pan Yinghan is one angry young woman. And the cause of her ire is that she finds many educated Chinese women seduced into thinking that finding a rich husband is more worthwhile than landing a decent job. Such women ought to take charge of their lives, says the 20-year-old, who is determined to put this message across to her peers.In February this year, Pan, a student of Brynn Mawr College, a renowned women's college in the United States, took the first step.
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The fledgling society gathers the Chinese alumni of the Seven Sisters, seven liberal arts colleges in the US - Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, Radcliffe, Smith, Vassar and Wellesley College - that are historically women's colleges.
Many women leaders and luminaries are part of the Seven Sisters' alumni. Among them are incumbent US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, one of her predecessors Madeleine Albright, former Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao and well-known Chinese writer Bing Xin.
What galvanized Pan into action was the disturbing revelation that many of China's well-educated university graduates were reluctant to invest their hard-earned education in a career but chose, instead, to depend on a spouse rich enough to support them as trophy wives.
Pan is indignant.
"The purpose of receiving a quality education for them is just to establish credentials to marry a rich guy. They don't even mind being a mistress to a millionaire, or even a highly paid escort," she says.
"That's why I established SSC - to inspire women to extend their excellence beyond school to all walks of life."
To deliver her message across the Pacific, Pan planned a series of activities, including a well-attended forum on Aug 7 initiated by the founding members of the organization.
The Women's Leadership and Self-development forum gathered 120 alumni from the Seven Sisters colleges and students from other renowned universities in China. Together, they shared the success stories of Lisa Robins, managing director of JP Morgan Beijing Branch, Lihua Jin, director of human resource in Novartis, and other women leaders.
Besides the annual forum, SSC also plans to organize company tours for fellow members to get a feel of a real working environment and discover their field of interest.
Establishing such an organization from scratch was no easy task with the first hurdle being money and support.
Pan first spoke to five schoolmates about her idea and found an enthusiastic audience. Word soon spread to the Chinese student community in the Seven Sisters colleges and messages were posted on a social networking website popular among students in China. The society soon had close to a 100 members, from both the US and China.
SSC also approached professors at the Seven Sisters Colleges, companies and foundations, and managed to raise $4,000.
"We knocked on people's doors, wrote hundreds of e-mails to professors and different companies," Liu Lingyi, another SSC founder says.
"It was a long process, but we are glad we made it. We learned how to write brief but persuasive proposals, we learned effective communicative skills.
"These are the practical skills that will help us in future."
Pan says she intends to study further after graduation from Brynn Mawr and hopes to hand SSC over to younger schoolmates. Like all good managers, she is already planning her succession and that augurs well for the small society with big plans.