Events

#Wednesday Gender Seminars

Date: March 25, 2026 (Wed)
Time: 12:30 – 14:00
Venue: Hui Yeung Shing Building G01, CUHK
Language: English

Speaker: YU Mengke, Maggie
(PhD Candidate, Gender Studies Programme and Department of Psychology, CUHK)

Moderator: Prof. Ivy Wong
(Associate Dean (Impact and Development), Faculty of Social Science; Associate Professor & Director of Gender Studies Programme; Associate Professor of Department of Psychology (By Courtesy))

Abstract

Despite substantial global progress in gender equality and women’s rising educational attainment, women remain underrepresented in top-tier leadership positions across business, politics, and academia. This research examines how improvements in societal gender equality shape pathways to leadership through two facets: individual leadership aspirations and cultural preferences for leadership prototypes.

Using PISA 2022 data from 80 countries, Study 1 identifies a robust gender equality paradox: as national gender equality improves, the gender gap favoring males in adolescent leadership aspirations unexpectedly widens. This pattern appears consistently across multiple indices of gender equality, suggesting that social progress does not automatically translate into equitable leadership ambitions. Study 2 further explores how societal gender contexts shift leadership preferences. Findings suggest that while gender-unequal societies maintain stronger preferences for dominance-oriented and male-typed leaders, gender-equal societies view prestige-based leadership as more effective.

These findings underscore that institutional advances in gender equality may paradoxically amplify psychological gender differences in leadership aspirations. To foster leadership equality, efforts must extend beyond structural metrics toward redefining leadership through prestige-based models. Shifting the leader prototype from dominance to prestige may provide more equitable pathways for women to emerge as leaders in egalitarian cultures.

Speaker’s Biography

YU Mengke is a PhD candidate in the Gender Studies Programme and the Department of Psychology at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research examines how social structures and environments shape psychological processes (e.g., motivation, social perception, and self-evaluation) using diverse methodologies, such as social psychological experiments, archival data, and ecological momentary assessment. Her work has been published in Applied Psychology: Health and Well-Being. Her current doctoral research investigates how improvements in societal gender equality influence women’s leadership aspirations and strategies.