The Global Gender Index

Times Higher Education has just published an article on the Global Gender Index produced in collaboration with Thomson Reuters. This consists of calculating the percentage of female academics among those universities included in the top 400 of the Times Higher Education World University Rankings and producing a percentage for each country.

This is a rather dubious exercise. The data is reported by the institutions themselves and, as the international unit of UK HE has pointed out, such data may not always be reliable. In addition, the universities that volunteer to be ranked by THE and Thomson Reuters may not necessarily be representative of the higher education sector in general. The global research orientated universities that make it into the top 400 may be even less so.

The report finds that everywhere women make up less than half the academic work force and that the numbers are lowest in Japan, followed by Taiwan. Numbers are nearly equal in Turkey.


Predictably, the article includes a call for universities to be ranked according to how far they have achieved gender equity among academic staff and a suggestion that East Asian countries should learn from Turkey.

There is a question that needs to be considered. If universities in countries like Taiwan and Japan are poised to overtake the West, as QS and THE are constantly warning us, should we be so eager to conclude that they have something, or indeed anything, to learn from Turkey or from Northern Europe?