Hong Kong's Old Boys Club Is Living on Borrowed Time
Putting more women on the city’s male-dominated boards is overdue and will improve its competitiveness with London and New York.
Women on board.
Photographer: Roy Liu/BloombergHong Kong’s cozy all-male boards have been put on notice. Rules that could become effective within months will force them to appoint at least one woman director. It’s an overdue change that may go some way to bolstering the city’s dented status as an international financial center.
The territory is an embarrassing laggard in the worldwide trend toward greater gender diversity. The proportion of female directors in Hong Kong companies that are constituents of MSCI’s flagship global equity index grew marginally to 12.7% last year from 12.4% in 2019. Granted, that’s far from the worst in Asia. But the city trails well behind London and New York, the global financial hubs to which it aspires to benchmark itself — and the gap is widening. Last year, 34.3% of directors of U.K. companies on the MSCI ACWI were women; the ratio for the U.S. was 28.2%.