经济学人

“TEN to 15 years from now, I think China can be eBay’s largest market on a gl obal basis.” So declared Meg Whitman grandly back in 2004. At the time, she was the chief executive of eBay, an American e-commerce pioneer. Things did not work out as planned. Local competition proved so fierce and nimble, in co ntrast to eBay’s managers, that the company was forced to beat a humiliating retreat.

2004年梅格·惠特曼曾如此郑重其事地宣告：“十至十五年之后，我相信中国将是ebay全球格局中最大的市场。”她时任ebay首席执行官，是美国电子商务行业的先驱人物。可是事与愿违。相对于ebay高层们的预期，事实证明中国本土的竞争非常激烈且灵活，以至于该公司最终败走中国市场。

A MERE 5% of the chief executives of the world’s biggest companies are women. And they are more likely to be sacked than their more numerous male colleagues: 38% of the female CEOs who left their jobs over the past ten years were forced to go, compared with 27% of the men. This is the latest finding from the research on the top management at the world’s 2,500 largest public companies that Strategy& (the clumsy new name for Booz & Company, a consulting firm) has been conducting since 2000.

全世界的顶尖大公司中，只有5%的首席执行官是女性，且他们被解雇的几率比他们的男性同事高出许多。过去十年内，在所有的离职女性首席执行官中，有38%是被迫离开，而同样职位的男性被迫离职的几率则只有27%。这个研究数据是来自“策略”公司（之前名为博思，是一全球著名咨询公司）一个从2000年开始的研究，是关于世界顶尖2500强的上市公司的最高管理层情况的调查。