Virtual China: Information Technology - Perspectives, June 25, 1999


	Perspectives Women Net Users Gaining Clout June 25, 1999 Lin Ping took her first whirl on the internet last year to find the e-mail address of a cousin living overseas. She found the address and in the process stumbled onto the world wide web, which powerfully enticed her with news stories she couldn't find in the government-controlled Chinese press, websites devoted to Western movie stars, and articles on travel, fashion, health, relationships and dating. "I started using the internet at least an hour a day," said Lin, who at the time was a secretary at a law firm here. "I got used to it in my life. If I didn't surf the net one day, I felt something was missing." It was only natural that when she got antsy at her law office job she started looking for another one on the web, and landed one within weeks. Lin is a typical member of a fast-growing segment of potentially the biggest internet market in the world -- women in China. While Western internet companies like ivillage.com, womenconnect.com, and webgrrl.com have for several years recognized the commercial potential of directly addressing women on the internet, that approach has only taken hold in China in the past six months. But it may soon take off even more quickly in China than the West. That's because of the size of the potential women's market in China - about 49% of the country's 1.3 billion total population is women - and because the internet is empowering women at lightning speed in this developing country. "More and more women in China realize the internet can provide them with more chances and more information than ever before," Lin said recently at her new workplace, Sina.com, one of China's biggest portal websites. "Chinese women are getting used to the internet in their life." While the number of women-related websites and internet services in China is still miniscule compared to the west, they have grown from virtually none a year ago to easily several dozen today - with more popping up all the time. Sina.com, the Chinese-language portal site where Lin Ping now works, runs fashion news and features, entertainment news, a dating site and is adding a horoscope feature that will be marketed mainly to women. Sohu.com, a Chinese-language portal that competes with Sina, also started a dating service, Chinese-language translations of stories from Cosmopolitan magazine, and expanded its fashion and entertainment sections recently after watching the number of women who watch the Sohu site jump from 15% of all readers to 20% in the past year. Elaine Feng, Sohu's manager of business development, says her site's dating service offers special value to Chinese women because it offers something they've lacked during the 5,000 years they've lived in country village conditions, even in China's big cities - anonymity from one's neighbors. "Our dating service makes the women feel more secure," Feng said. "They want to go about the process in a very subtle way." Another new internet community service recently started for Chinese women, "Go Girl" at www.51GO.com, makes anonymity for its readers the theme of the entire site, which is to help young Chinese women explore the world without fear of losing their reputation honor in the neighborhood. Members of the Go Girl web community are offered discounts at stores, chat with each other about relationships, careers, health and money, and earn points that can win them trips overseas. Articles on the site discuss issues like making the most out of a limited budget for clothes, creating a personal fashion style, and "Can Friendship Develop Into Love?" "Traditionally in China, you don't go out and talk to strangers," said Byron Constable, the marketing director of 51GO.com. "Especially for women, you stay within your family or you meet people your family introduce. On the web it's very easy to join a group outside the family, safely. So women are starting to explore the world for the first time in China's history." According to the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), the government agency that compiles internet metrics, there were 2.1 million web surfers in China as of January 1999. Within that group, CNNIC reported that 86% were men, and 14% were women. However, nearly all internet experts in China agree that both sets of numbers are seriously misleading. CNNIC counts only registered users among those who access the internet in China, preferring to overlook the technically illegal but universal practice of multiple users of one account. At companies, for instance, only one computer may be registered in a given department, with a dozen or more people using that computer throughout the day. So most internet experts put the true figure of internet users in China at closer to 5 million today, as compared to around a million a year ago. Similiary, CNNIC arrives at its 86-to-14 men/women ratio by counting only registered users. Again, howeer, it is usually men who tend to register as internet users, both at home and at work, while actual users in both place are almost certainly a more even balance of the sexes. Stephen Chow, for instance, the sales and marketing manager of Zhaopin.com, a popular job-hunting website in China, says that visitors to the site are close to a 50-50 split between men and women. For Zhaopin.com, Chow says, the challenge is therefore not to attract increasing numbers of women readers to his site, but rather to more alluringly entice those Chinese women who are already avid websurfers to his site and away from the competition. Towards that end, Zhaopin.com is presently adding several new to address the special concerns and needs of female job applicants, such as stories on pregnancy leave and company day care policies, salary standards and negotiating techniques, glass ceiling issues, and so on. Mark Levine, who is starting a new Chinese-language internet service in Beijing called E-Babycare, says his challenge will be less getting people to spend more money on baby care, than finding a profitable way to adapt via the internet to China's existing spending patterns on babies. "In Chinese families you often have one kid, two parents, and four grandparents," Levine said. "So you've got a lot of people funneling money down to the kid. People spend a disproportionate amount of their money on their babies. It's a case for e-commerce." With only a few million people surfing the internet at present, Levine says that gaining widesrpead consumer acceptance of the internet as a safe medium for exchange may prove even harder in China than in the United States and Europe, for several reasons. There is virtually no consumer credit in China, nor banking infrastructure to handle large numbers of such transactions, nor a relatively inexpensive and reliable delivery system. Yet in the early stages in China, that may not prove such a problem, because at this point the main commodity attracting new Chinese women to the internet is information, and the price is right: free. While a few Chinese magazines and foreign publications translated into Chinese, such as Cosmpolitan, regularly publish high-quality articles on articles on health, careers, money, legal issues, mothering, parenting, relationships, and sex for modern women in China, the price of the magazines may remain out of reach for many of them. A Chinese woman's magazine may cost RMB 16 (US$2), and Cosmopolitan in China costs RMB 50 (US$5.50) - either one of them a high price for women with salaries ranging from RMB400 (US$45) to RMB8,000 (US$888) a month. According to CNICC, 37% of internet users in China have a monthly income of RMB400-1,000; 33% between RMB1,000-2,000; and 25% above RMB2,000. Sohu, the popular Chinese-language portal, reports that 61% of its visitors make a salary of RMB1,000-2000 a month; 13% from RMB2,500-4,500 a months; and 26% above RMB4,500 a month. Time as well as money is another major barrier to women's wholehearted adoption of the internet as a tool in their lives. "Women who work at a business like the internet because they can use it during lunchtimes and at breaks," said Ling Pin at Sina.com. "But many women don't visit the web, not because they don't like it but because they don't have the time. Housework occupies most of their time." Still, free is a hard price to beat, especially when it comes to information that may ultimately allow Chinese women to turn in their mops and for jobs and degrees. That's why Ling Pin is betting she's only at the front edge of a wave that eventually will swell to include a great proportion of China's 600 million women. "If you use the internet you become more powerful," she says. "That's why, in the future, it will become a part of women's lives in China."	Archive

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