Jack Ma explains why this is the era of women

Last week, Jack Ma popped up on a CCTV program filmed in England and said some very interesting things about how he views money and wealth. But on that same program, he also addressed other topics – in fact, he gave an entire keynote speech about women.

Not all of what Ma says would pass for politically correct, but as he points out in the speech, Alibaba is probably the best tech company in the world when it comes to hiring and promoting women. So what does Jack Ma think? Here’s our translation of his speech:

Why Alibaba has so many women

I’m here to talk about the issue of women. This issue, I think, is very interesting. Basically all men are willing to talk about it. But not every man who talks about it can actually handle it well.

England is a very great country. I was thinking about it on the way here; it’s very rare that a country has a Queen and a female prime minister at the same time. This country also has many amazing female scientists, thinkers, and authors. When I was studying English, there was a simple novel that was a must-read called Jane Eyre. From that to Harry Potter today, all women have made great contributions to England’s history. After the first industrial revolution, women in England went from wearing skirts to wearing pants, which was a big step forward.

So I think that ‘women’ is very interesting topic, and one we’re paying more and more attention to these days. I didn’t used to pay attention to what kind of work our company was doing [on this front] until last year, a month before our IPO an American reporter came to our office. While walking around, he asked, “How come there are so many women at your company?”

Alibaba’s offices

I said, “Anything wrong?” I hadn’t realized this was some kind of issue. He said “Out of all the world’s high-tech companies, I feel like there are a lot of women at Alibaba.” I realized this was a real thing, so I went back and asked my colleagues to investigate how many women our company had. At the time, the answer was 52 percent. Now it’s 49 percent, because we’ve bought a few companies that have more men than women.

52 percent of our company is women. 35 percent of our management staff is women. 23 percent of our senior management is women. We’ve had a female CEO, a female chairman, a female CPO, CFO, etc. Our company also has a lot of female engineers, and of course a lot of female PhDs.

So what’s the secret to Alibaba’s success? Actually I think one of our important secrets is that we have a lot of women. I’m not just saying that to please women, the facts bear out that we’ve got the highest percentage of women on staff at any major tech company. But as a CEO I didn’t think I needed to go promote the position of women, so when the reporter asked that question, I didn’t really get it. ‘What’s wrong with that?’

Of our 18 founders, more than one-third are women. I think it’s only right that the amount of men and women be roughly equal, only then will everyone feel comfortable and innovation happen.

As you know, of the three big technological revolutions humanity has had, the first started in England. It was embodied by muscles getting bigger and bigger, it released the physical strength of humans. What people were competing over back then was physical strength. The second tech revolution started in America, and it was about energy: making people longer-lasting and increasing endurance. These two tech revolutions were all about the power of males.