Women can't have it all but they can still make good life choices, feminists say

There has been a lot of talk about a new brand of feminism recently, much of which was played out in the US.

The conversation moves to Hong Kong next week when Debora Spar, a prominent figure in the debate, arrives to join two International Women's Day events.

Spar is the president of Barnard College in New York. Her invitation to Sheryl Sandberg, the Facebook chief operating officer, to address the college's students in 2011 drew a gutsy commencement speech which called on women to "lean in" and hold on to their ambitions.

It started a spate of public discussions about women's struggle with work-life balance as they sought success. Prominent figures such as former State Department official Anne-Marie Slaughter weighed in on why they just won't be able to have it all - the high-powered job, the perfect family life - unless there are significant changes at work and home.

Spar offered her own take last year in Wonder Women: Sex, Power and the Quest for Perfection, a book she had been working on well before Sandberg's book Lean In, also released in 2013, where the Facebook executive expanded on her message of an empowered female workforce.

Like Sandberg, Spar is a very successful woman. She was one of the first female professors at Harvard Business School and went on to become the chair of her department. In 2008, she became the president of Barnard, arguably the most important all-woman college in the US.

It was in this new, all-female, environment at Barnard that she became aware of the pressures young women face: not only the push to succeed in their career and personal life, but also how they responded to their mother's generation, throngs of women who had tried and failed to "have it all".