Emma Harden-Wolfson

I promised more from our new book chapter on gender and education in Central Asia and here you have it!

As part of our exploration of the available data on gender and education, co-author Lyazzat Shakirova and I decided to look for statistics on women in leadership roles in the region. This could help increase our understanding of whether, for example, greater educational attainment for girls/women leads to greater presence in leadership roles, and what role other structural factors might be playing.

One of the positions we wanted to look at was university leaders (rectors) – but there was no dataset for the region. You can guess what happened next: yes, we created the dataset. This involved combing through the websites of the 400+ universities in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan to identify who was in charge. Lyazzat should take much of the credit for this idea and doing most of the data collection.

The results?

A very mixed picture, as we explain in our new article for University World News. In Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, just about 5% of all higher education institutions are headed by women. In Kyrgyzstan, it’s over triple that at 17%, but the regional leader is Kazakhstan, where over a quarter of rectors are women.

This quite possibly makes Kazakhstan a global leader in female leadership in higher education – there isn’t much reliable/comprehensive data out there to compare with, but estimates from other regions suggest that about 15-20% of universities are led by women.

Excellent news for Kazakhstan – but before we get too excited, we’re still a long way from getting to gender equality there or anywhere else… and that’s before we even start thinking about what true equity might look like.

Find out more in our University World News article (published March 14, 2025), Data on female rectors: Some positive news from Kazakhstan.