Women hold one in five board seats in Hong Kong firms for first time, report says

The proportion of seats occupied by women on the boards of Hong Kong-based companies has surpassed one in five for the first time, but significant disparities remain in senior-management representation and pay equity, reports show.

Across all Hong Kong-listed companies, 20.8 per cent of board seats were occupied by women as of October, up from 19 per cent a year earlier and 16 per cent in 2022, according to a report published by MSCI, an American financial company known for its indices. Companies with a woman in the CEO’s office increased to 5.6 per cent from 4.4 per cent a year earlier, the report added.

“[Asia-Pacific], a diverse region that encompasses both developed and emerging markets, continued to move towards increased gender diversity, particularly in reducing the number of all-male boards,” said Moeko Porter, APAC corporate governance research lead at MSCI.

Do you have questions about the biggest topics and trends from around the world? Get the answers with SCMP Knowledge, our new platform of curated content with explainers, FAQs, analyses and infographics brought to you by our award-winning team.

Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing (HKEX), which runs Asia’s third-largest stock market, changed a rule three years ago to require every listed company to have at least one female board member by the end of 2024. As of January, 85 listed companies, or about 3 per cent of the total, had failed to comply, according to HKEX. At the time of the rule change, about 800 firms or 40 per cent of listed companies had all-male boards.

Companies with boards that were at least 30 per cent female achieved 19 per cent higher cumulative returns than those without, MSCI said.

The percentage of companies with a woman in the chief financial officer role fell to 14.8 per cent as of October from 19.1 per cent a year earlier – the second-largest decrease in the Asia-Pacific region, the report said.

In general, women earned up to 30 per cent less than men in basic pay last year, according to the Women Workplace Index (WWI), which includes more than 250 companies in Hong Kong across 16 sectors.

“The gaps in bonus and total compensation are even more substantial,” WWI’s founder and CEO Nicole Yuen said in a statement.

While more than half of companies had an equal-pay policy, only 16 per cent of them tracked gender-pay metrics, with even fewer reporting such metrics, the report said.

Only one in four companies had set quantitative targets for female representation, it added.

Just 36 per cent of enterprises disclose their parental leave policies, with less than 10 per cent providing leave beyond statutory requirements and only 5 per cent having clear disclosures on the number of days offered.

“Public disclosures of women’s workplace policies are crucial for shifting corporate culture,” Yuen said. “They create a subtle yet effective obligation for improvement and facilitate the sharing of best practices.”

More from South China Morning Post:

• Hong Kong bourse’s 2024 profit rises 10% to a record on surging stock transactions, IPOs
• Hong Kong stock market can help emerging AI companies raise money: HKEX CEO Bonnie Chan
• World underinvested in China amid ‘spectacular’ technology advances, HKEX CEO says
• 85 Hong Kong-listed companies miss deadline to put women on boards

For the latest news from the South China Morning Post download our mobile app. Copyright 2025.