Check this out… It’s an interesting article that a friend forwarded to me…

I used to be exactly like Swee-Ting and Linda. Perhaps not as successful, but definitely under the same category of “independent career women”. I almost felt like I was betraying the independence of women by giving up my high flying corporate job for the stay at home role of a house wife. I secretly lavished the thought of preparing for full time motherhood, while on the surface, I expressed a desire for some R&R and to rethink my strategy before my next move.

It was interesting to note that a lot of my girl friends started to express the same desires when I talked to them. It seemed a stark contrast to the image that I had formed in my head about the women’s liberation movement that had penetrated into a male dominated workforce. Gone were the era of my mother’s days where the majority of women stayed home to look after the home and children, or so I thought.

I think this article symbolises what we women really want – simply the power of choice.

Saturday April 15, 2006

Meet the new Malaysian woman

By SULIN LAU

MEET Swee-Ting and Linda.

Both could be poster children for the New Malaysian Superwoman. Swee-Ting runs her own international consultancy firm while Linda was headhunted by a global investment bank when she was 23. Both are very bright, impeccably educated and ridiculously successful – scoring five-figure salaries before their 25th birthdays.

At first glance, their stories seem to confirm our view of today’s women – intelligent, confident, career-oriented and above all, fiercely independent of men. Women who relish competing head-to-head in traditionally male-dominated businesses and would gladly trade marriage for career and postpone family for individual self-pursuits.

But the picture quickly changes once you ask them about their plans for 2006.

“I’m officially retiring in September,” announces Linda, who turns 29 in two months. “I’ve worked most of my life to get where I am, thinking this life was what I wanted – but it isn’t. Before I married my husband last year, I made sure he was ready to support me.”

Swee-Ting, 31, has similar plans in the pipeline. “No matter how high you’re flying, there comes a time when you get tired of living in boardrooms, hotels and airports. I think I’ve gotten all that out of my system now, and I’m ready to shift gears. Meet someone, start a family, and all that. You can’t do that when you’re working 16 to 18 hours a day.”

Climbing Down the Ladder: If there’s anything the Signbank project has taught us, it is that consumer knowledge is a lot like fresh produce. It goes bad after some time.

In other words, every consumer insight has an expiry date. Take our understanding of the so-called “modern Malaysian woman” for example. Most of us see them as career women – females who have spent the last decade excelling at being just “one of the boys”.

However, our interviews with 50 Malaysian career women revealed a very different picture. In talking to these under-35s, single women all earning in excess of RM5,000, we were shocked to find many more Lindas and Swee-Tings. Women who, despite their impeccable qualifications and hard-earned success, no longer aspire to be the heroic independent working girls they once idealised.

The new un-independents: Over the last six years, we have seen a 24% increase in women who marry young (between 20 and 29 years). Matchmaking, an age-old tradition, is now returning with a modern twist and gaining increasing popularity with a number of dating services now catering specifically to successful professionals searching anxiously for love and belonging.

While not many have the financial support to actually retire, a remarkable 52% of our respondents admitted they had definitely “secretly fantasised about quitting their jobs and becoming a tai-tai“. What is more, 66% agreed that “my life would be incomplete if I didn’t have a man to love me.” Said one interviewee: “I remember a time when my girlfriends and I would laugh about how our moms would badger us about finding a man and settling down. Now I see a few of my friends getting married, becoming housewives or baking cakes for a living and I think that’s cool.”

A new kind of heroics: While magazine features and conventional marketing research still glamorise the Ideal Woman as one who seems capable of just about anything and who excels at everything, our findings reveal different.

Many Malaysian women are starting to realise the futility of constant juggling and impermanence of boardroom victories. And 43% had even started to view such achievement-orientation as selfish and masochistic. One interviewee in her early-30s articulated this shift best: “People used to brag about how much they were doing. Now they brag about how little. Go figure.”

Implications for marketers: While it is highly politically incorrect to say so, it is perhaps time that we in marketing acknowledge that our mental stereotype of modern women as career-hungry corporates is long past its use-by date.

The new Malaysian women find no shame in being great homemakers, and are instead looking to a new generation of Martha Stewart-esque lifestyle divas to help them perfect such “old-fashioned” womanly skills such as cake decorating, knitting and gardening. Borrowing a recent quote from showbiz celebrity mom Wardina, young mothers are increasingly reprioritising their lives to become “full time mothers, part-time everything else”. This new way of perceiving their role and priorities, in turn, has significant implications on how we position a variety of products from household consumables to fashions and fragrances.

If happiness and success for modern Malaysian women no longer requires achieving success in a masculine sense, then marketers would also certainly need to re-adjust their current interpretations of what makes feminine bliss. All in all, there’s never been a more exciting time to market to women.

· The writer, who is Naga DDB’s strategic planning director, can be reached at Sulin.Lau@nagaddb.com.my. DDB Signbank currently operates in 10 markets across Asia and 52 countries worldwide, the largest global trendwatching network of its kind. Recently named Agency of the Year 2005, Naga DDB is also home to Malaysia‘s only D&AD Yellow Pencil and has won more Asian Brand Marketing Effectiveness awards than any other Malaysian agency.