International Women’s Day: why the glass ceiling in Hong Kong still exists and how to smash it
- More than half the Hong Kong workforce is made up of women, but they are not well represented at senior levels
- Fewer than 3 in 10 senior managers in the city are women, a survey recently found; prejudice, cultural barriers are bad policy are to blame, academic says
The corporate world looks nothing like it did 50 years ago – it’s faster, super hi-tech and, critically, there are women in the workplace in numbers that couldn’t have been imagined half a century ago. But despite the changes, the way companies operate is not much different.
“The corporate setting has to change, I don’t think it works any more. The work structure we know today was created by men for men. Women now work in that environment. We need to fundamentally think about how organisations are structured, how we develop a structure of inclusion, how we deal with calling out bad behaviour,” says Kirti Lad, executive director of Meraki Executive Search & Consulting in Hong Kong.
Lad sensed that the city was behind the curve, and a new study highlights just how far behind it is. The “Female Talent Pipeline Study”, published by the University of Hong Kong and Meraki Executive Search & Consulting, is the most comprehensive research undertaken in Hong Kong about female talent in multiple business sectors.
It surveyed more than 200 companies employing more than 200,000 Hong Kong people and interviewed more than 100 women, and the results are being released today, International Women’s Day.
The key finding is that while there are plenty of women in the workplace, they are not well represented at senior levels. Their participation rate falls as they rise up the ranks; while women make up 53 per cent of the total workforce, they account for just 29 per cent of senior management.
Lad isn’t demanding that women change; she wants the workplace to adapt so women can not only survive but thrive.