Female HE Leadership On The Rise
Recent data indicates that female leadership in HE is rising, with some way still to go before it is no longer a point of discussion. Women today lead almost three in 10 of the world’s top universities, according to new analysis from THE. Female vice-chancellors or presidents run 29 per cent of the top 200 institutions in Times’ World University Rankings 2026, a 170% increase since 2019, and a seventh consecutive increase year-on-year.
Following International Women’s Day, @Elisabeth Kelan, professor of leadership and organisation at King’s College London’s Business School states, ‘this is symbolically important … yet numbers alone do not mean that practices and cultures within universities are shifting at the same pace, and change remains uneven.’
Some European countries have healthy representation of female leaders: a shout out to the Netherlands (55 per cent), with Germany (33 per cent) and UK (31 per cent) above the global average too. Whilst some hypothesise that women are brought in specifically when institutions face exceptional challenges, others comment on the V-C ‘merry-go-round’, with institutions showing a low appetite for error or flawed legacy decisions.
Whichever is true, all higher education leaders taking up the mantle today face unprecedented challenges. All must demonstrate ambition, a commitment to transformational leadership and a necessary appetite for disruption and risk.
