The appointments of Claudine Gay at Harvard and Deborah Prentice at Cambridge who are set to take up their posts in July will ensure that we usher in a new era where women are free not to just work but also lead in top institutions.

Universities like Oxford and MIT are already women led, making Stanford the stand alone University from the elite 5 that will remain with a man, Marc Tessier-Lavigne with the exact role. As of now, a quarter of the universities have women at their very top positions, 48 out of the top 200 universities. If we flip the pages of history, we’ll find that 90 years ago Kate Galt Zeneis was the only woman with such a job at her disposal at the Southeastern Oklahoma State (name of a university).

However, if we allow ourselves to be critical and if we try to dig up further than the shiny and glittery surface of positive news of the society taking huge strides and leaps in women empowerment, we are faced with a reality that speaks volumes as to how the world is yet to progress a lot. 12 out of the 27 countries that have their Universities enlisted in the top 200, do not have any woman to boast of leading their ranked universities.