Hong Kong universities lack female leadership, says pro-vice chancellor of Chinese University

Women have long broken through the glass ceiling in public life in Hong Kong. No one blinks an eye if the chief secretary for administration or the permanent secretary for education is a woman, and it might not be long before we have our first female chief executive.

But Hong Kong's tertiary institutions are another story. With the exception of the Hong Kong Institute of Education, none of the city's universities have had a woman vice-chancellor or president. And across Hong Kong, there are just four women pro-vice chancellors.

Professor Fanny Cheung Mui-ching, the first woman pro-vice chancellor of Chinese University, presented stark data at a workshop on women's leadership, organised by the British Council in Dubai, on the fringes of the Going Global conference.

Women might account for 53 per cent of undergraduate students in Hong Kong, but the higher the academic rank, the sparser they become - 43 per cent of research postgraduates, 34 per cent of faculty members, 4 per cent of deans, and zero vice-chancellors or presidents.

Hong Kong does well in the Times Higher Education's international rankings, but not in its Global Gender Index, where it falls in the middling rank for proportion of women in academia and would not register in the top leadership at all.

But Hong Kong academics, along with their peers in other countries in East Asia, had something to do with that index.