Laura Liswood has made it her mission to hurry history. It has been nearly a century since International Women's Day, which takes place today, was first held in 1911 to honour women's rights movements.
Change was slow in those early years, borne out by English novelist Virginia Woolf, who lamented in the 1920s and 30s how women, perceived by society as the intellectually inferior sex, had little opportunity for careers or to express artistic ability because of stereotypes and a financial dependence on their husbands.
In the new century, women enjoy the same right to vote as men in most countries and have climbed to equality in wealth - as indicated by a Citibank survey in Hong Kong published last month that said women for the first time constituted the majority of the city's 276,000 millionaires.
However, Ms Liswood, secretary-general of the Council of Women World Leaders and a senior adviser to Goldman Sachs, said it was a widespread misconception that equality between the two sexes had been achieved.
To start with, Ms Liswood, a Californian, said the US had yet to see a female president. Although the number of women in the US Senate has doubled from a decade ago, she predicted it would take another 250 years to attain equality between men and women. The percentage of female legislators in Hong Kong - 18 - remained far from the critical mass of around 30 per cent necessary for them to become an effective force for change.
She said that recent statistics released by the UN revealed that in no country did women and men share housework equally.
Ms Liswood, who was in Hong Kong last week as the keynote speaker at a female leadership forum co-hosted by the Women's Foundation and Goldman Sachs, was in no doubt that women would receive equal treatment.
