Where are all the women? 4 in 5 senior academics at Hong Kong’s publicly funded universities are men
Extra family workload and unconscious biases in hiring and promotion cited as key reasons for imbalance
Four in five senior academics at Hong Kong’s eight publicly funded universities are men, the Post has found, fuelling concerns over gender equality in local higher education.
The latest figures, obtained from the University Grants Committee (UGC), suggest an environment of adversity for women rising through the ranks in academia. They also sparked renewed calls for the government and schools to introduce more family-friendly measures and extra training to battle unconscious biases against female staff.
Only 18.8 per cent of senior academic staff – defined by the UGC as professors, readers, principal and senior lecturers – at the eight public universities were women in 2017-18.
The University of Science and Technology (HKUST) was the least diverse institution, with a proportion as low as 12.2 per cent, compared with the Education University, where 27 per cent of senior academic staff were women.
Faculties appeared to have become slightly less male-dominated in the lower ranks, with 33.7 per cent of junior academic staff and more than half of academic support staff – such as demonstrators, tutors and teaching assistants – being women. The overall female percentage of academic staff stood at 40.3 per cent.