This chapter examines women’s representation in the leadership positions at key world-class research universities in the Asia Pacific region. It engages with documentary research into the case studies of various Asian flagship universities, namely National Taiwan University, Peking University, Seoul National University, the University of Hong Kong, and the University of Tokyo. The documentary research is based on an in-depth review of the academic literature comprising empirical studies which investigate and explain the representation of women academics and their involvement in intellectual leadership at Asia Pacific higher education institutions. Special attention is paid to the significant factors that structure female engagement in leadership roles. The determinants that either facilitate or impede the women’s representation in academe and senior managerial positions are reviewed to make sense of the empirical findings of this study. The findings indicate that the University of Hong Kong (HKU) has the highest representation of women leaders (28.9%) who are mainly from non-STEM backgrounds and are also most prevalent at the departmental level. HKU has also, among the five case-study universities, higher representation of female institutional leaders (14.3%). Another East Asian world-class university which has made better progress in gender equality and university management is National Taiwan University (24.6%). For working toward inclusivity of intellectual leadership in the East Asian academic profession, there needs to be more culturally sensitive and gender-appropriate policies and practices in the human resource management in universities, which are sensitive to the personal and professional lives, including marriage and family obligations (Tang 2017). The inclusion of more women professors in leadership positions can serve as much-needed role models for mentoring young female academics. Through better gender-informed and humanistic implementation of human resources

This chapter observes that branding is a stated strategic priority of four out of seven public universities in Hong Kong. However, the branding activities they propose miss the essence—the alignment of their various identities. By adapting the concept of corporate branding to the analysis of their self-representations in four distinctive types of communication materials (strategic plans, vision and mission statements, student recruitment materials, and press releases), we introduce a new approach to university branding study by examining the content alignment in addition to the content itself. Findings show that while all Hong Kong universities have balanced their self-representations between excellence and uniqueness, new technical universities that openly state branding as a priority show more signs of alignment in the communication materials.

Purpose: This paper examines the way in which higher education participation is democratized in the entrepreneurial city of Hong Kong by the policy innovation that encompasses internationalization. There is a dearth of empirical studies about transnational education in Hong Kong, except for a few which examine students' perceptions of transnational education from a user perspective, situated in marketized conditions (Leung and Waters, 2013; Waters and Leung, 2013a; Waters and Leung, 2013b). The minimal volume of existing research has ignored the innovative aspects of democratizing higher learning by internationalization, namely the operation of international degrees by overseas universities on offshore campuses. This policy innovation by transnational institutions is significant in an era of the globalization of higher education, as access to higher education cannot be otherwise realized given the local education policies. Design/methodology/approach: Employing documentary research, this paper presents and assesses the growth of community college international education at the University of Hong Kong and its unique facets, juxtaposing it with the marketized context of East Asian higher education. It engages in specific reviews surrounding the operational mode and academic collaborations of the international educational programs and practices at the Hong Kong University’s School of Professional and Continuing Education (HKU SPACE). Findings: This documentary research finds that the internationalized academic profession of partner universities enables curriculum design, pedagogy, teaching ideas and assessment methods to be informed by an diversity of international academic cultures and indigenous knowledge. Through this policy innovation, international education is institutionalized in such a way that it takes Hong Kong students beyond the community college context, which is relatively localized. It also illuminates the way in which the "ideoscape" of American community

This article examines the significance of global trends in higher education (HE) development in Hong Kong between 1997 and 2012. Two trends, massification and internationalisation, are considered key driving forces that shaped Hong Kong’s HE policy during the period. The former refers to government measures to widen participation in HE. The latter is associated with Hong Kong’s regional education hub strategy. Universities in the city revised their governance structure in these contexts. The article first explains why massification and internationalisation entered the HE policy discourse in Hong Kong in the late 1990s, and how they were materialised by neoliberal practices in the 2000s. Subsequently, it reveals how the two trends influenced university governance by examining the development of the University of Hong Kong Group. Based on this review, this article argues that the HE development can be perceived as an extension of structural transformation of the Hong Kong economy.
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