Women fail to crack China's glass ceiling as party picks new leaders

BEIJING (Reuters) - Every time China’s ruling Communist Party convenes a major gathering, like the congress that just ended in Beijing, the list of delegates is hand-crafted in part to burnish the party’s image as “representative of the masses” - including giving some prominence to those in more menial jobs and ethnic minorities.

Yet one group is chronically under-represented among the political elite: women.

The founding father of communist China, Mao Zedong, may have once said that women “hold up half the sky” but when the twice-a-decade party congress selected a new batch of top leaders this week, females weren’t holding up much at all.

No women made it onto the elite Politburo Standing Committee, the group of seven men at the pinnacle of the party. None ever have.

In the new Politburo, only one of its 25 members is a woman -- Sun Chunlan, head of the party body charged with outreach to non-Communists. It is her second term and she is likely to retire in five years. On the previous Politburo, there were two women, Sun and Vice Premier Liu Yandong - who is past retirement age and has stepped down from the Politburo.

One rung down, just 4.9 percent of the new Central Committee, a mere 10 of the body’s 204 members, are women. That number was unchanged from the outgoing Central Committee, which presided for five years, but lower than in 2007-2012 when there were 13.

(For a graphic on 'Women in China's Communist Party' click tmsnrt.rs/2lcfg0w)

The State Council Information Office, which doubles as the party’s propaganda department, did not respond to faxed questions for comment on why there are so few women in senior party positions.

By way of comparison, five members of U.S. President Donald Trump’s 24-member cabinet are women, and about 20 percent of the U.S. Congress are female. In Japan, two out of 20 members of the cabinet are women as are about 10 percent of the lower house lawmakers newly elected on Sunday.

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At the Chinese party congress itself, the overall numbers were stronger: about a quarter of its 2,287 delegates were women - roughly commensurate with the proportion in the roughly 90 million-member party.

But with most senior leadership posts in the hands of men, activist Xiong Jing, an NGO project manager who edits a feminist social media site, said many of the women delegates to the party congress were there merely as “decoration”.

“This problem is a cliché,” she said. “With the political system as it is now, I think even if more women were involved, whether as party congress delegates or in government, they may be very limited in what they can do.”

The party takes the appearance of representativeness seriously when it comes to some groups.