Quarter of world’s top 200 universities led by women

View the full list of the top universities led by women

Women hold the position of vice-chancellor or the equivalent at 50 of the world’s top 200 universities, data gathered by Times Higher Education show.

There are two more female leaders in the job compared with last year, and 22 more than in 2015 when THE first started collecting the data, representing an 79 per cent increase over nine years.   

The US, home to the highest number of female leaders in the list – which is drawn from the THE World University Rankings 2024 – has seen a decline from 16 to 15 in post, as of 1 February, while there are four more leaders across Europe. 

The UK now has nine leaders, up from eight last year, after Deborah Prentice took the helm at the University of Cambridge in July 2023.

Sweden has doubled its number of female leaders in the top 200, going from one to two, while the Netherlands now has six, up from five. Italy has one female leader in the top 200 – Sapienza University of Rome enters the top 200 having previously been ranked in the 201-250 band.

Finland, Ireland and New Zealand have one university each in the top 200, all of them led by women.

In the US, two female leaders lost their jobs in high-profile circumstances in recent months.

Claudine Gay, Harvard University’s second female and first black president, stepped down in January amid plagiarism accusations and criticism about her appearance before a congressional hearing on antisemitism. Professor Gay’s presidency lasted just six months, the shortest in Harvard’s 388-year history.

The former president of the University of Pennsylvania, Elizabeth Magill, also at the hearing, resigned in December after appearing to evade the question of whether students who called for the genocide of Jews would be in breach of the university’s code of conduct. She had led the university for only 18 months.

Professors Gay and Magill were both replaced by men, interim presidents Alan Garber and Larry Jameson, respectively.

Campus resource collection: Wisdom from women leaders in higher education

The US has 56 universities in the top 200 in total, making their share of leading universities run by women 27 per cent. More than a third (36 per cent) of top UK universities are led by women, while 55 per cent of the Netherlands’ 11 top universities have female heads.

Germany has consistently had a strong cohort of female leaders and, this year, six of its 21 top universities have women at the helm (29 per cent).

A spokeswoman for Humboldt University of Berlin, which is currently on its third female leader, said that at public universities in Germany “promotion is precisely regulated by law” and “women’s and equal opportunities officers must be involved in the associated processes”.

These officers are “called upon to act as a kind of controlling body to take structural and individual measures against discrimination against women”, she explained.

Simonetta Manfredi, professor of equality and diversity management at Oxford Brookes University, who has researched gender equality in higher education for decades, said that there could be biases in the processes of hiring university heads and called for the sector to introduce a target for the number of female vice-chancellors.

“If you think about it, in higher education, and indeed in other types of organisation, you use targets all the time. You’ve got targets for recruitment of students, you’ve got targets for all sorts of things. So I don’t see any reason why, if equality is to be taken seriously, we shouldn’t use it in that space as well,” she said.

Top 10 universities led by women 2024

Note: The analysis was based on the university leader in post on 1 February 2024 and included 201 institutions because three universities were tied in 199th place.

Note: This story was amended at 1.30pm on 6 March due to an error, to state the number of female leaders of the top 200 universities is 50, not 51. Other statistics were amended accordingly. 

rosa.ellis@timeshighereducation.com