I first met Amy back in 1997 when I was living in Tianjin, a port city of 10 million people 2 hours east of Beijing. Probably only about a hundred foreigners were living there then, and many of them worked at the big Motorola plant that had just opened. Crowds of dirt- and sweat-stained rural migrant workers who had come to the city to find jobs would follow me around, as one of the few foreigners, and shout, “Hello!” They stood grouped together on roadsides, holding up “Job Wanted” signs with their skills scrawled on cardboard. When they would see me, they would come running.

One middle-aged man, whose clothes were so blackened by grime I wondered if they were his only set, approached me and said excitedly that I was the first foreigner he had ever spoken to. He must have been dirt poor—I could see his ribs sticking out from underneath his shirt, and he stank—but he was so excited to meet me, he insisted on treating me to a meal of crispy duck followed by unfiltered cigarettes so strong they burned my throat.

I used to love biking through Tianjin’s leafy boulevards, lined with the old mansions that Europeans had erected more than a century before during the waning days of the Qing Dynasty. The buildings were a welcome contrast to the drab, crumbling, Soviet-style block housing that made up the rest of the city. I would often eat my meals on one of those streets at Broadway Café, one of the few restaurants in the city that served Western food.

Amy was a waitress there. She was petite, with short cropped black hair and a bashful, mousy demeanor—she looked as if she might scamper away just for being talked to. She was clearly someone who had been taught to keep her head down and blend into the background for most of her life. Over the next several years, I exchanged only a few words with her beyond asking for more water or French toast. I don’t think she ever looked me in the eye. She seemed to change very little from year to year. When I finally left Tianjin for good in 2001, I said good-bye to her, got a quick curt smile in response, and did not think about her again.

Nearly a decade later, I was back in Tianjin on a business trip. I was walking around my old neighborhood, marveling at how completely the place had been transformed. The old block housing was gone, replaced by fancy modern restaurants, shops, and towering skyscrapers. As I wandered around, I heard someone call out my name. I turned around and found myself suddenly being grabbed in a tight embrace.

At first, I didn’t recognize the woman in her late twenties hugging me. I looked closer and realized it was Amy. In place of that plain, bashful young girl I remembered stood a beaming, confident young woman, wearing expensive makeup, toting a designer bag, and sporting a salon-styled hairdo.

Looking at the stylish girl standing in front of me, a decade of change crystallized right in front of my eyes. Instead of the meek waitress with whom I made awkward, limited conversation in that Tianjin restaurant just 10 years before, I was now looking at a polished and self-assured businesswoman.

Later that night, Amy and I went to restaurant after restaurant while catching up. In many ways I was getting to know her for the first time. “Life is so good,” Amy said, grinning. Since I had last seen her, she had left her waitressing job and had taken a series of jobs at several of the multinational firms that were flooding into the city and was now thinking about starting her own firm. “The time is now or never to be an entrepreneur,” she said. “I don’t know what I’ll do yet, but I will do something.” Amy smiled, fueled by self-confidence and her parents’ wholehearted support of her newfound business acumen.

After the Cultural Revolution and the arrest of the Gang of Four, the government concentrated at first on creating wealth and improving gender equality to promote stability. This approach was smart for two reasons. First, wealth creation makes it a lot easier for people to stop dwelling on the suffering they faced in earlier years and makes them less likely to push for violent change. Second, countries that push for gender equality generally develop more quickly and foster more vibrant economies and cultures.

During the Cultural Revolution, being a capitalist was a heinous crime, as Deng Xiaoping and his paralyzed son knew all too well. Now that notion has been turned upside down. People who are not making money are too often looked down on because they lack ambition, potential, and social status. In many cases, the drive to make money has resulted in excesses, including many unscrupulous businesspeople who lie, cheat, and cut corners as they try to get rich. Many Shanghainese girls told me they would not even consider marrying someone who has not already bought a house (without a mortgage) and car.

An electric business climate is pulling and pushing everyone to pursue money. Everyone knows someone, or maybe even has a relative, who was formerly a peasant raising pigs or tilling rice paddies covered in night soil (human manure) but who now drives a Mercedes and owns multiple villa-style townhouses. Fifteen years ago you needed only $6 million in total assets to make the top 100 on the Forbes China Rich List; in 2011 the mark was $120 million. China now has several hundred billionaires in U.S. dollar terms—all self-made—and more than 1 million millionaires. The Hurun Report estimates there are more billionaires in China than in the United States. I personally know at least 10 people who were barely scraping by to survive two decades ago but who are now billionaires. With all the dizzying wealth creation around them, everyone feels like they, too, can make it big and achieve their dreams.

Rapid growth has driven Chinese women to break out of their formerly subservient roles and reach parity with men in society’s eyes. In Amy’s case, she went from meek waitress to savvy businesswoman to fledgling entrepreneur. As we parted that evening, Amy told me to keep in touch and suggested that we “do some business deals together soon.”

Prior to my first trip to China, my image of Chinese women had been limited to portrayals in movies such as The Last Emperor or The Joy Luck Club and by stories of the travails of women recounted by relatives on my mother’s side of the family, whose ancestors had left southern China in the 1840s to work on the railroads in California. My family had never actually been to the mainland, but they told me all the horror stories that had been passed down from generation to generation about the plight of women.

When I first arrived in Beijing, I half-expected women to be concubines with bound feet who were treated like chattel—or at least downtrodden, like the women I had heard my relatives talk about. To prepare for my trip I had read lots of newspaper articles about the male-female gender imbalance, but there’s not much objective literature or general knowledge in the West about China’s current culture or what it is actually like to be a Chinese woman. By reading current depictions in Western media of women in China, it is difficult to envision a forward-looking society led by powerful women. For instance, Japan-based Bloomberg columnist William Pesek argues that Chinese society “neglects” women and that there is rampant gender discrimination. As proof, he points to the fact that only two women have been appointed governors in China, whereas Americans have elected 32 during the same time period.

When you see firsthand how the role of Chinese women has changed since the mid-1990s, however, it is clear that the idea of the modern Chinese woman is the opposite of images like those in The Last Emperor and that analysts like Pesek are holding onto and perpetuating outdated notions of women’s role in Chinese society.

Female empowerment has paradoxically been accelerated by the implementation of the one-child policy, introduced in the late 1970s to curb runaway population growth. It is true that the one-child policy has caused sex-selective abortions and outright female infanticide in rural areas, where the importance of strong bodies and hands for farm labor has created a powerful preference for boys. This policy has also helped result in a male-female imbalance of 118 to 100, often much higher in rural areas. Some estimate that there are 30 million more men of marrying age than women.

However, for years the government has been taking several steps to combat infanticide through such measures as banning doctors from reporting a child’s sex to expectant parents and allowing parents to have two children in some parts of the country if the first child is female. They have also allowed women to initiate divorce; likewise, arranged marriages are a rarity now.

In urban China, where physical strength is no longer needed to support the family, girls are as welcome as boys. All the hopes, dreams, and aspirations of parents and grandparents, whose lives were disrupted by the Cultural Revolution, are placed on girls, who are raised as little princesses. Women are now viewed as just as capable—if not more so—as their male counterparts of performing highly on achievement tests and ultimately becoming the breadwinners of the family. This shifting mentality has caused male-female ratios in urban areas to draw closer to the worldwide norm, which is 107 males for every 100 females, according to the Central Intelligence Agency.

Many couples still bribe doctors to disclose information about the child’s sex, especially in rural areas, but the preference for boys is beginning to decline there also. China’s urbanization rate rose higher than 50 percent for the first time in 2010, up from 30 percent just a decade earlier. Prime Minister Li Keqiang has set a 70 percent urbanization rate for the country within the next decade. As a result, strong hands for farming are no longer as prized as they once were. Additionally, the government has made establishing better social security and medical care access for rural communities a priority, which further reduces the notion that a family needs sons to help care for elderly family members as they become infirm.

In the past three years, when interviewing migrant families in major cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, I discovered an even more surprising trend: Female migrants often outearn their male counterparts. More women are starting to work in service industries, taking jobs such as waitressing and house cleaning, where salaries tend to be higher than in physical work–based jobs such as construction and recycling.

In the 1950s, the first decade after the Communists came to power, Chinese women accounted for only 20 percent of household income. In the 1990s, when I first met Amy, they accounted for 30 percent. Now women account for more than half of income, and more women are in university than men. Women purchasers account for 55 percent of the luxury items bought by mainlanders, and Forbes reports that 7 of the world’s 14 self-made billionaires are Chinese women.

Research suggests many Chinese women enjoy working and are not willing to stay at home. In many cities like Shanghai, couples who are themselves both only children are allowed to have two children rather than just one. A survey conducted by the Guangzhou-based magazine New Weekly, however, found that 81 percent of eligible couples countrywide wanted just one child; only 14.5 percent said they wanted two. The main reasons were that they were worried about the high costs of raising two children and how having two children would influence the couple’s career development. The Shanghai Academy of Arts and Sciences found that 45 percent of Shanghainese couples did not want a second child.

Positive trends toward gender quality, accompanied by the hard facts on the ground, mean that Chinese women are becoming empowered in the workplace, and their changing role in family dynamics, especially rural families, has had more impact on Chinese society than is understood by most Westerners.

Amy is typical of the generation of Chinese women born in the late 1970s and early 1980s, who shifted from being meek girls to confident, aggressive consumers and entrepreneurs. By contrast, Melanie, a young woman born and raised in China, is a good example of an urban woman born in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Melanie and I were sitting next to each other on one of the newly opened high-speed trains that cut travel time in half from Nanjing to Shanghai and increased business productivity. She was tall and had an athletic build, long and sculpted legs, and a bouncy smile. The train was so crowded that her leg pressed against mine, and an old man on my other side practically had his arm in my lap.

I had planned to spend the train ride reading, but Melanie struck up a conversation. She began telling me about her family and her career goals. Her body language showed she was at ease opening up to a foreigner; she had none of the shy nervousness that Amy had when she was a waitress at Broadway Café in Tianjin.

Melanie told me her mother was denied the chance to go to college because the university system closed during the Cultural Revolution. By the time universities reopened in the 1980s, her mother was already too committed in her career working at a state-owned enterprise to go back to school. She also missed out on profiting from the great economic reforms that were going on because she was too unsophisticated to open her own business. She remained mired in a low-level position in her company until she lost her job in the late 1990s, as tens of millions of other people did when the government cut state-owned enterprise jobs to move to a more market-oriented economy.

Melanie’s mother had married not out of love, but because the Chinese government had labeled her husband as an appropriate, marriageable candidate based on his family background. Permission from the government was needed to marry in those days. Over the years, Melanie’s mother had come to accept her husband, but like so many Chinese families in her generation, marriage was more a pact for shelter and support than a match made out of love.

As Melanie described the pressures her parents put on her, I saw in many ways her mother was living vicariously through Melanie. She pushed Melanie to get a master’s degree so her daughter could have the education she had missed and to gain Communist Party membership to benefit from opportunities. Finally, she pushed Melanie to marry for love rather than security. Melanie’s father virtually ignored her mother; however, he showered Melanie with boundless love and support.

Melanie’s remarks of how her mother and father behaved resonated with my own experiences. When nightclubs first started opening up in China, club-goers were usually middle-aged men and women dressed up in revealing clothes as if they were 20-year-olds and dancing with an unnatural ferocity. It always seemed to me they were trying to capture a past they had never gotten a chance to experience.

My talk with Melanie showed how clearly the Cultural Revolution still affects Chinese society across generations. Melanie’s mother felt she missed out on her career and a happy home life, so she pushed her daughter to strive for the best and to realize her dreams. She also spoiled her, waiting at home for her every night until she got home from work to make dinner for her. Despite Melanie being in her twenties, her mother still washed all of her clothes.

Outside of work, Melanie had few financial responsibilities or costs. Her parents covered her food and housing expenses. She was so confident of her future career earnings that she did not save any of her $1,000 monthly salary at her entry-level business development job with a consulting company; she spent it all on shopping and eating at restaurants with friends. She had just signed up for a credit card, so instead of having to save up for two months before buying the latest iPhone, she could buy it on credit. She told me she changed her mobile phones every nine months and sold her old ones through online e-commerce sites like Taobao.

China has millions of young, upwardly mobile women just like Melanie. They are showered with love and are taught to believe they can achieve anything. Their parents are doing whatever they can to help them achieve the goals they had for themselves but were not able to achieve because of the disruption of the Cultural Revolution. And they are optimistic that their personal and professional lives will continue to get better and better and better.

• • •

Most horror stories about China’s gender inequality now occur in rural areas. Some villages have 150 boys for every 100 girls, and in these backward places women are still destined to live lives of servitude. Thankfully, as with rising gender equality in urban areas, the inferior status of rural women is starting to change, as salaries for the positions migrant women typically take in the service sector outpace those of men and as better educational opportunities are introduced.

Julie came from a totally different world than Melanie. I met her one day in Shanghai at a massage parlor. My feet were aching after a long run, and I needed a foot massage to ease the kinks out. Julie was the masseuse assigned to me. As I dipped my feet into a bucket of warm water laced with traditional Chinese medicinal herbs—the first part of a foot massage—Julie started to tell me her life story.

Julie was born in the late 1980s on a rice farm in Jiangxi in south central China, one of the most underdeveloped provinces in the country. Life there was a struggle for everyone when Julie was a child. Access to food often depended on conquering nature. Frequent floods and droughts scourged the area.

Where Julie grew up, 40-year-olds looked like 90-year-olds, as the hard farm work turned skin into leather. Feet were calloused from walking the mountainous terrain without adequate footwear, and fingernails were yellow and thick. Luckily for Julie, she was not destined for a life on the farm. She married young, and she and her husband left the countryside alongside tens of millions of other migrants looking for work in urban areas. Through hometown connections, they ultimately both found work in Zhejiang, an industrialized province, at a fashion-accessory factory. There she glued buttons onto accessories destined for America and Europe. Soon, Julie found a job at a foot massage parlor and dropped her tiresome job in the factory for the higher-paying position as a masseuse.

Julie later moved to Shanghai, where she now gives massages to as many as seven wealthy Chinese clients a day. Foreigners sometimes come, she said, but Chinese are the bigger spenders. The pay and working conditions in massage parlors are better in Shanghai than in Zhejiang. The work is hard and tiring, and she has huge, yellowed calluses on her knuckles from pressing against her clients’ feet, but she makes nearly $700 a month—a fortune in her hometown, where it often takes half a year to make that much.

Unfortunately, Julie’s husband couldn’t find work in Shanghai, so he returned to Zhejiang, where he makes $200 a month as a worker in the fashion-accessory factory. Julie said it is tough being away from her husband, whom she married for love, but her family needed to make money.

Julie said she recently bought a $90,000 apartment back in her hometown of Jiangxi, using mostly her own earnings as a deposit. She had saved most of her earnings for eight years to put a 20 percent down payment on her home. For the vast majority of Chinese, owning a home—something that was not allowed in the first four decades of Communist rule—has a profound significance. People do whatever they can to buy a home, and they view it as the ultimate goal in life. They often pool money from parents and grandparents and live together under one roof. The average age of a home buyer in China is 27, five years younger than the average home buyer in America.

Julie’s two-year-old daughter still lives back in her hometown and is being raised by her husband’s parents, so she saves as much of her earnings as possible to send back to them. It is hard being away from her child, Julie said, but as she started to push acupressure points on my feet, she justified it to me. “I can make more money than my husband,” she said. “We have no culture, no education, so I have to do the work because he cannot make much. My plan is to work here for several more years as long as I am young and physically fit, and then I will go home to be with my family. Maybe I will use my savings to open a small clothing shop.”

As Julie told me her story, I could hear alternating pride and frustration in her voice. She was proud of becoming the main breadwinner in her family and of the respect this position commanded from her in-laws. The frustration was prominent when she spoke about living away from her daughter and even more so when she explained to me that her husband would shortly be moving back to Jiangxi to be with her.

Julie said her husband could probably earn almost as much in Jiangxi cobbling together odd jobs as in a factory in Zhejiang, and having at least one parent raise their child is better than none. Generations of Chinese children have been raised by grandparents over the past two decades so parents in their twenties can find better jobs in cities, to work in factories like Laura Furniture’s in Guangdong. Sadly, these parents often can afford to return home only during the Chinese New Year holiday.

Job prospects are improving in rural hometowns, so one parent often moves back home to be with the child, like Julie’s husband did. Construction in particular is slowing in first-tier cities like Shanghai and Beijing and is starting to accelerate in rural areas, so men are finding more construction jobs back in their hometowns. With wages often higher in service sectors that attract women, men are increasingly the ones returning home while the women stay in cities to earn more money.

Four of the maids who have taken care of my home’s affairs tell similar stories. All of them make far more money than their husbands do. One of them, Little Qian, told me that her husband was a scrap metal dealer in Shanghai. He combed garbage areas and picked up discarded metal from wealthier housing compounds for recycling. In a good month he made a third of what she did—and we provided her housing on top of her pay. Her husband finally decided to move home to Sichuan Province to raise their eight-year-old son because salaries for the work he could get in his hometown were almost as high as in Shanghai.

Little Qian is barely five feet tall and slight in build. She tires easily. I often wonder what kind of life she would have had if she had been born a few decades earlier, when the economy was largely agrarian. Her value to the household probably would have been low because she is too small and weak to contribute much in the fields. Although she is a good-hearted person, she has a hooked nose and gray-black buckteeth. She probably would not have been valued by her in-laws for her beauty and would not have earned her family a big dowry.

In today’s China, however, Little Qian has become the main earner for her family, an impossible role for her only decades before. When she returns home for vacations, she always packs bundles of goodies for everyone in her extended family. When she comes back from her trips home, she excitedly tells us about how happy each relative was to receive this box of cigarettes or toy car or that bottle of cosmetics.

Countless rural women like Julie and Little Qian have become the main wage earners in their families in just the past few years. The job sphere for even rural women is expanding at a very fast pace. Men are increasingly returning home to do what has typically been a female task: raising children. Whereas uneducated men are often limited to low-paying factory jobs or construction jobs, uneducated women have expanded their reach and are able to work in restaurants, massage parlors, and other service-oriented jobs, including doing secretarial work in white-collar companies, where pay is higher as a result of the tight service-labor market.

Women from all regions and sociodemographic groups are seeing palpable changes in the quality of their lives and are no longer desperate enough to work as prostitutes or in other degrading jobs. Why should they, when they can make just as much money as a waitress, even if the work is tough?

New job opportunities, better access to education, and more equal positions in family life are creating a modern Chinese woman. No longer trapped in the countryside, where it is difficult to earn subsistence wages, they are working in well-paying jobs that allow them to save and empower them with unprecedented choices when they consume, be it a new house or the latest trends.

Whether it is the waitress-turned-entrepreneur Amy, white-collar businesswoman Melanie, the masseuse Julie, or the maid Little Qian, the modern Chinese woman is using her newfound wealth and position to influence consumption habits and change how brands should approach the Chinese market. For brands like Laura Furniture, which need to convert factories from focusing on production for export to America to selling into China, or simply for brands looking to offset dwindling growth in America and Europe, understanding how the modern Chinese woman shops is critical. Not only do they have money, but they also influence major household purchases, such as automobiles and real estate, that were traditionally the male domain.

Young female shoppers in China are not as price sensitive as many analysts believe. Women tend to be value driven rather than price sensitive and look for products that confer status. This means women will shop for luxury brands like Louis Vuitton and Gucci despite the hefty price tag because they feel these well-known brands project an image of high status that makes them feel successful, which is what gives them value. However, other women gravitate toward more affordable brands like Spanish apparel retailer Zara or H&M because the clothes are comfortable and of good quality but not too expensive.

The importance of product safety and good value to Chinese women is defining the consumption habits of the entire middle class. In many ways, women’s rise in Chinese society and their shopping habits have redefined the Western idea of the emerging Chinese middle class. There is a middle class from a socioeconomic standpoint, but far too many analysts attribute to it the same aspirations and shopping characteristics as the American middle class.

Unlike in America, where people are often born into middle-class families and are content with their children staying in this demographic, Chinese women in the middle-income group are optimistic that they can climb even further up the social scale, either because their salaries are rising so quickly or because they expect to become entrepreneurs themselves, like Amy in Tianjin. With this positive outlook, they purchase more freely than more cautious middle-class Americans as long as they believe they are buying a safe, high-quality product. Put another way, they don’t view themselves as middle class, but rather on the way to becoming rich.

They shop in a way that mirrors the shape of an hourglass. They either buy luxury products or the cheapest products in categories they do not value. Brands positioned in the middle level, such as Gap, get lost in the drive for Louis Vuitton or the cheapest items possible.

• • •

If there is a drawback to all of the love and attention being showered on Chinese women, it is that many in urban areas are becoming spoiled to a dangerous extent. Part of the problem is that parents who suffered during the Cultural Revolution don’t want their daughters to go through any hardship. They indulge their little princesses, rather than help them learn how to overcome any obstacles they might face on their own.

When the going gets tough, many parents teach their daughters it is better to get going and run away from difficulties. When a job gets too hard or the hours too long, parents often support the mentality of quitting the job and finding another, perhaps in a state-owned enterprise where salaries are high and hours are short. In interview after interview with multinational executives in China, I heard complaints about all of the otherwise bright and talented young Chinese women—and men, in many instances—who were unwilling and unable to tackle serious challenges. At some point decades from now, their lack of grit and determination to overcome challenges, and their willingness to take on debt, might cause China to face some of the same challenges that America is now.

The empowerment of women is one of the great developments of modern Chinese society and is a further factor in the end of cheap China. Women are becoming the key drivers of spending; they are beacons of optimism in the country and a major force behind China’s transition toward becoming one of the biggest markets in the world. Western brand managers need to change their outdated notions about who the modern Chinese woman is and what she wants. Chinese companies are already starting to understand these powerful consumers and are improving their brands to appeal to their values.