The Hindu Business Line : Life is more than just a job

"I gave myself time to decide if I wanted to stay home for the rest of my life, just as some of my college mates had done, but I said: `No, I'd drive myself and my family nuts! I'm quite a driver of things. I can get along very well with my colleagues because I give them the ammunition and drive them; they feel my energy levels and do things. But you don't do that in the family; otherwise your husband and kids will run away. So I didn't quit!"

Today Margaret Leung is the Group General Manager and Global Co-head of Commercial Banking, HSBC. It is interesting how this girl from an "all boy's family" ended up graduating in business administration from the University of Hong Kong in 1975.

Her family wanted her to be a medical doctor; "the dream of every family in those days; some of my brothers became doctors and took away the burden from me!" Growing up with brothers she was a bit of a tomboy and would climb, fight, "and everything else that the boys did, because if I didn't, I couldn't survive. My family realised this and put me in a girls' school to make sure I had some feminine touch!"

She did go through a two-year premedical course but the dissection sessions killed her interest "and I said this is not for me. Even though she got good marks, she didn't apply for medical school, and didn't even choose it as an option, to the chagrin of her parents and teachers, "because in those days business schools were looked down upon; people wanted to be in medicine, or computers."

What drew her to business administration was the wide scope it offered. Before graduating she had a couple of offers in hand, and opted to join an American bank as a management trainee, had a quick promotion, went to a British bank after 18 months and the following year was head hunted into the HSBC with her salary doubled.

That was in 1978 and she is thrilled to have travelled the distance where HSBC grew from a regional bank in 1978 to the third largest bank in the world in terms of market cap and the largest in terms of assets. Initially she thought she'd stay there for 18 months and move on, but its "phenomenal growth" ensured that she stayed on.

With forays into the UK, then US and later Latin America, "we've made sure that we're a global bank in terms of geographic spread — we have a third of our income from Europe, a third from the two Americas and a third from Asia." Interestingly the composition of staff too at the HSBC is roughly in that proportion and while English is the main language spoken within the group, the second largest is Spanish.

Early days

But the woman who holds top positions in the group today — she is also director of HSBC Investments (Hong Kong) Ltd, HSBC Insurance (Asia-Pacific) Holdings Ltd — and can now proudly say that 48 per cent of executives in the group today are women, was a lone woman executive in Hong Kong in 1978. Beginning from her first day in office, till the time a few male subordinates started reporting to her, she got queer looks that said: "What is this woman doing here?' But times keep changing. Not only are 48 per cent of our executives female, the gender ratio is much better in this region," she says.

When she began her career there were six graduate trainees from very good universities. "I was the only female which was not surprising and only one with a first degree. I did equally well; I can't say I'm better than them, three of them were MBAs, and I was the only one with a first degree so competing with them was a challenge," she says.

Margaret is happy that at her first job she was given a lot of challenges. "American banks pay you very well but they extract the maximum from you, and before you know it you have to make presentations; the learning curve just zooms." While she has enjoyed the challenges that her career threw up, Margaret admits that many women either drop out even as their career is advancing, or stagnate at their own choice. Does it have to do with the increasing demands from the home and family, particularly in Asia? Has HSBC faced this challenge?

"Yes, and that's not just in India or Asia. Even in the UK or the US, there is expectation that the mother stays at home. And in this part of the world domestic help is easy to get, the family culture is much stronger; thanks to the nuclear families you can always get a mother or an aunt to look after the baby." On helping its women employees to cope with this challenge, she says HSBC has initiated several measures such as childcare centres for use of both women and men, flexi hours, a nursing room for mothers in some countries, and a longer maternity leave and even paternity leave.

Glass ceiling

On the glass ceiling that she has managed to cross, Margaret regrets that many of her senior colleagues "whom I thought of very highly, eventually fell by the wayside. They did not drop out but lost the momentum, many of them voluntarily by saying: `I want to spend more time at home. I don't really want a more challenging job. I don't want to travel or be posted overseas.' In fact most of the women who were very good in the beginning, have become... I would not say mediocre, they're still doing very well, but they are not realising their full potential... "

She feels that the important thing to note in a place like Asia is that women do this voluntarily; "part of it has to do with the culture and the Asian sense that the family should be looked after by the wife and the mother."

Margaret treads a ground familiar to every working woman in India when she says, "Even if you're doing a full-time job, even if you have a domestic servant at home, you're expected to give instructions on what food to buy, what food to cook, which time to take the children out, etc!"

Her response to the obvious question on her personal experience is interesting. Initially she and her husband — a dentist who runs a clinic in Hong Kong — decided they would have no children. "But then things change, and we wanted a family." So her two daughters arrived and when she was posted to Australia and decided to take the two girls, aged three and two years, "everybody said you're mad," because she would have to go without her husband, who had his own clinic to look after.

Looking back, Margaret smiles at what a great decision this turned out to be. "When I was in Hong Kong with the two children there was a lot of expectation from me because all the mothers look after their children, take them to doctors, schools, everything is expected from the mother. If the father turns up for any of these, people think something is wrong with the family."

Shedding cultural baggage

But she went to Australia without this cultural baggage; "it was totally different there, I got a professional nanny to take the girls to school and look after them. In Hong Kong, children are very protected. My nanny was very good and wouldn't do a thing for them unless they said `thank you' in a proper way."

The girls grew up not only well trained but tough too, and "since there was no 24-hour television like in Hong Kong, we'd spend time reading together." She loved her posting (1985-88) so much that "at one stage I didn't want to come back. I enjoyed my stay there because there was no pressure of an Asian role or culture... that baggage was gone!"

But in 1988 she had to take a call, and though her husband volunteered to shift to Australia, she decided to return to Hong Kong and with an eye on her profession.

"I could clearly see by the end of 1988 that the development is in Asia, the future is here, and we should stay here." And, her daughters always had the option to study either in Asia or Australia, or even the US where her brothers live. Incidentally both are studying finance and, shaking her head, the beaming mother says: "No influence!"

So what more would she want to achieve in her career?

"It really depends on what you mean by `career'. Career does not always end with a job, particularly with the change in demographics when you expect people to live longer. I think life is more than just a job; there is so much more you can do. With such an experience level you can always be a mentor, consultant, advisor and there is so much you can also do for charity/CSR," she says, adding, "As I said I drive people nuts when I stay at home, and I think I would drive people nuts if I retired full time! One has to use the energy one has!"

With a twinkle in her eye she adds, "I'm still a very sporty person... I play golf, I go to the gym, and I swim. I don't jog anymore because people tell me that at my age and my weight I'm killing my knees, so I do a lot of brisk walking."

When you comment that the weight hardly shows on her trim person she says, "Oh, it's there," adding that one reason for this was her fondness for all cuisines... French, Thai, Indian and, of course, Chinese.

Women executives outnumber men

Ask Margaret Leung what kind of skills women bring to the table and she says: "I don't know if it's a universal trend, but it is certainly an Asian trend, at a younger age or the fresh graduate level, women are more mature in their thinking. Things might change later but at that age, their communications skills are better and they express themselves better. Also, there is more maturity in terms of thinking, better interacting with people. If you have to employ somebody and if there are five candidates very often the girls beat the boys at the university graduate level, as I did too!"

While HSBC employs more women than men, if the clerical and executive positions are taken together, women outnumber men in executive positions in the South East Asian region.

In Thailand, 78 per cent of the group's executives are women, while Brunei, Taiwan and Singapore have 63 per cent women executives, followed by Philippines (56 per cent), China (51 per cent) and Hong Kong (48 per cent).

Unfortunately India, with a woman CEO in Naina Lal Kidwai, has only 24 per cent women executives, the same as Japan.

Response may be sent to rasheeda@thehindu.co.in

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