Women and girls in lion dance

The short version

For most of the 20th century, southern lion dance was a men's activity almost everywhere it was taught. Women who took part are described on cymbals, gongs or background drums, with a few wartime and village exceptions: in 1937 and 1938 a group of teenage girls danced lions through Boston's Chinatown to raise money for China, and women's troupes began in Bến Tre and Guangzhou in the 1980s. Since the late 1990s that has changed fast. There are now women's and girls' troupes in Boston, Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Penang and Bến Tre, women's divisions at contests, and mixed teams where women dance the head. The old rule has not vanished. A December 2025 report from Hong Kong Baptist University's Lion Rock Tales site says a belief about menstruation is still one reason many Hong Kong companies have no female dancers,¹ and a woman instructor at a New York club described a similar rule in 2017.

Most of the evidence is news features, video descriptions and troupe websites, with one full-length academic study of Boston's Gund Kwok (a 2018 dissertation), so a claim to be first is usually the troupe's own. Etiquette and the eye-opening rite are in Chapter 9, the US story is in Chapter 13, the Asian picture is in Chapter 12 and the modern scene is in Chapter 15.

The old rule and the reasons given for it

No source read for this guide cites a written rule. The exclusion appears in what dancers and coaches say about their teachers, parents and elders, and the reasons differ.

Three points stand out. The menstruation reasoning is told as something a teacher said, not as a ritual text, and the Tyee article also quotes the University of British Columbia historian Josephine Chiu-Duke, who argues the exclusion had more to do with social status than gender, since early 20th-century lion dancers were often tied to secret societies.⁷ Where a rule is named it is usually about the head, above all a consecrated one, while women on cymbals, gongs or background drums were accepted.^4,5 One Hong Kong coach says his wife trained beside him from 1969 but played only background drums at public and religious shows.¹ And older women lived under the rule: Chow says elderly women in Chinese and Canadian seniors' homes were never allowed to practise, be photographed with the lion or touch it, and the room reacts with shock when girls lift off the head.⁶

Not everyone agreed. A 2024 profile of the Malaysian lion-head maker Xiao Feihong opens with an unnamed speaker who dismisses the saying that girls cannot touch lion heads by asking the person who said it whether his mother was a woman. Later a speaker says nearly every group now has a girl or two. The captions are machine-translated.Xiao Feihong profile @ 0:00¹⁰

Early exceptions before 1998

Women appear before Gund Kwok, mostly at the edges: wartime fundraising, village troupes, school classes and the music section.

• Boston, 1937 to 1938. After Japan's full-scale invasion of China in July 1937, eight teenage girls in Boston's Chinatown took up a lion head imported from China, practised with swords, learned technique from male friends and joined weekly fundraising parades for a year, according to Casey Avaunt's 2018 dissertation. She cites a 2001 newsletter piece from the Chinese Historical Society of New England headlined "Boston's First Lion Dance Troupe Formed over 60 Years Ago." One dancer, Helen Woo, recalled thinking, "if the boys can do it, so can we." The girls wore costumes their mothers made and went from restaurant to shop asking for money, and Avaunt notes that another dancer, Marjorie Eng, and many others performed only in 1937. She finds no later record of girls dancing: a 1941 Boston Daily Globe report on the war's fourth anniversary shows men dancing, and the only females it describes are "drumettes" in a school band. She reads the girls' dancing as a product of Chinese nationalism, which praised heroic women, and argues that their presence also made lion parades look safe while Chinatown tongs were in the news. Her abstract gives the war years, 1937 to 1945, but the parades she documents run from 1937 to 1938.¹²
• Vancouver, 1939. Lion Rock Tales cites a photograph from the Hon Hsing Athletic Club of an all-female team raising war relief funds for China.¹ The Tyee describes the club today as men-only.⁷
• Bến Tre, Vietnam, 1981. The Lương Hòa women's lion troupe (đội lân nữ) began on the sixth day of the first lunar month of 1981 with 18 women aged about 50 or older. VnExpress reported in March 2010 that the village lion troupe had been all male while women performed in a cultural troupe, and that the women formed their own after one volunteered to try the head. By then it had 16 members, mostly in their 70s, and a head weighed over 6 kg. The article says Guinness Vietnam lists it as Vietnam's only women's lion troupe.¹³
• Guangzhou, 1985. The Guangzhou Workers' Lion Dance Association started a youth team and a women's team when it was founded on 1 January 1985.¹⁴
• The 1990s. A Hong Kong coach calls this the turning point, when schools opened lion classes to girls.¹ A US thesis says women joining teams then mostly played cymbals or gong, and a New York paper says the Chinese Freemasons were among the first to train women.^15,16 David Lei says women were banned at one point.¹⁷ A 2017 news report cited by Avaunt counted just three active women among about sixty dancers at the Freemasons club. Jeanne Chin, a Gund Kwok member who grew up in Boston's Chinatown, told Avaunt she never saw women dance lions there, and Avaunt writes that the exclusion lasted in Boston until Gund Kwok began.¹²

Gund Kwok and Boston

Gund Kwok was founded in February 1998 by Cheng Imm Tan, whom Avaunt describes as a reverend and social activist. The name means heroine in Cantonese and is almost certainly 巾幗/巾帼 (Cant. gan1 gwok3, Mand. jīnguó), though the characters are inferred, not seen in a source.¹¹ Avaunt quotes Tan's 2017 Boston Voyager interview tracing the name to an old saying that the scarf does not give way to bushy eyebrows, meaning women are as good as men. That matches the idiom 巾幗不讓鬚眉/巾帼不让须眉 (Cant. gan1 gwok3 bat1 joeng6 sou1 mei4, Mand. jīnguó bù ràng xūméi), which supports the guess at the characters.¹² Tan grew up in Penang, where her parents would not let her learn kung fu because girls were not supposed to be strong. By Avaunt's account she had studied martial arts, found other classes male-dominated, and then saw a lion dance at a Chinatown event and recognised its martial arts stances. The troupe began with about ten women, friends of Tan, taught for about a year and a half by Eddie Lau, a former Wah Lum chief instructor, and Tan went to Hong Kong to buy lion heads, cymbals and drums. Tan and her husband Ken Morin then studied in Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia, most notably with Master Mah Yoke Seng of Penang.^11,12

By 2013 it had 24 women, required 75 percent attendance, gave 18 to 24 performances a year and ran a 10-week trial class; fees went to equipment and to charities for women and girls.² It now runs an 8-week trial for women of Asian descent and a Cubs Troupe for children aged 6 and over, and AARP counted members aged 12 to 66 in 2024.^4,11 It dances mostly Fat San (Fut San) with Hok San heads, a mix it calls Fat Hok, and also a Hakka lion (see Chapter 4, Chapter 5 and Chapter 6).¹¹ Tan told AARP that early audiences were shocked because the women's moves were harder than the men's, and told the Peabody Essex Museum that the aim was an Asian women's community that did not exist when the troupe began.^4,23

When Avaunt did fieldwork with the troupe, from August 2016 to September 2017, it rehearsed on Thursday nights in the basement of the China Trade Center in Chinatown, which also holds the Chinese Historical Society of New England's office. A back room held about a dozen lion heads, red and gold as well as bubble-gum pink and purple, and a large golden dragon. The troupe is volunteer-run, and the fees paid by those who book it go to running costs and scholarships. Its ten-week training course cost $100 in 2018. Membership is open to anyone who identifies as female and as Asian, including women with a non-Asian parent.¹²

In 2017 the troupe worked through Chinatown shops on Lunar New Year in a snowstorm, opening with five lions. On 21 January 2017 it played a pre-march rally at the Boston Women's March, with three lions and six drummers in front of what Avaunt puts at 175,000 marchers. It also performed at the Museum of Fine Arts in February 2016 and at a June 2015 scholarship ceremony for about twenty college-bound young women, and it takes weddings and birthday parties. The troupe did not enter the New England Lion Dance Competition, begun in 2011 in Worcester, Massachusetts, though Tan and some members attended: a member told Avaunt that competing does not fit its mission of building community and empowering women.¹² Early press, in Avaunt's account, included a 2005 article in Audrey magazine, a Fox 25 News feature of 3 February 2006 and a Boston Sunday Globe article of 30 April 2006, "Asian Women Flex Muscle with Lion Dance."¹²

Others followed. The Nuwa Athletic Club formed in 2017, and WBUR quoted musician Connie Wong on women building their own strength and stamina.²⁴ Wah Lum Kung Fu and Tai Chi Academy in Malden and Quincy calls itself women-led and entered a Female team at the 2023 national championships.^25,26 Casey Avaunt's 2018 dissertation, built on archives and on fieldwork with the troupe, is the fullest study of Gund Kwok. She says earlier writing mostly stresses empowerment, and she also examines tensions around Asian American women's bodies, including how unpaid performances for museums and festivals can use the dancers as decoration.¹² Adam Cheung, a former White Crane dancer whom the troupe brings in to drill technique, told her that Gund Kwok changed how Chinatown understands lion dance, and two members recalled men's groups that felt very masculine and sometimes dangerous, so that parents kept children away.¹²

Hong Kong and mainland China

Hong Kong

The HK01 video is titled 三歲習武周身傷 女舞獅盼男女平等/三岁习武周身伤 女舞狮盼男女平等 (Cant. saam1 seoi3 zaap6 mou5 zau1 san1 soeng1, neoi5 mou5 si1 paan3 naam4 neoi5 ping4 dang2, Mand. sān suì xí wǔ zhōushēn shāng, nǚ wǔshī pàn nánnǚ píngděng), meaning learning martial arts at three, hurt all over: a woman lion dancer hopes for equality of the sexes. It continues 我的獅頭跟男生用的一樣重/我的狮头跟男生用的一样重 (Cant. ngo5 dik1 si1 tau4 gan1 naam4 saang1 jung6 dik1 jat1 joeng6 cung5, Mand. wǒ de shītóu gēn nánshēng yòng de yíyàng zhòng), my lion head weighs the same as the boys', and ends with a series name, 隱形香港/隐形香港 (Cant. jan2 jing4 hoeng1 gong2, Mand. yǐnxíng Xiānggǎng, Invisible Hong Kong). Only the title and description were read. The description names the dancer as Yuki, a four-time Hong Kong open champion who began at three, and records her saying the older generation held that girls must not touch a lion head, above all an eye-opened one, as unlucky.HK01 video on Yuki @ 0:00⁵ A Goldthread video on a Hong Kong centre that trains women was also known only by its description.Goldthread video @ 0:00²⁷

Lion Rock Tales gives the fuller picture. Kwok's Girls is an all-female team inside Kwok's Kung Fu and Dragon Lion Dance Team. Its leader, Lai Yun-ting, 29, has practised for 17 years, and the team's Instagram account has over 33,000 followers; she says her parents felt girls should be more reserved. The South China Morning Post feature on the team, by Sammy Heung and dated 26 April 2025, says four young women who have given more than half their lives to the art practise at least once a week around their day jobs, here beneath a bypass in Tai Kok Tsui, and that one of their videos drew 2 million views on an Instagram page with more than 30,000 followers; it dates the parent club to 1969, and only its opening paragraphs could be read.²⁸ Tatler Hong Kong (2 February 2024, by Zabrina Lo) instead gave 1949 as the parent club's founding year and counted ten members of the women's group.²⁹ It names three of them, all in their twenties with day jobs and taught for more than ten years by the club's head, Kwok Man-lung, and says they practise on Friday nights in a Mong Kok community-centre car park, not the site the Post describes.²⁹ It lists a July 2023 variety show and Lumieres Hong Kong in September 2023 among their performances, and quotes Lam Hoi Hei: "Now, I want to win contests."²⁹ At Yun Fook Tong in Sha Tin, Lam Wing-yan, 26, a physiotherapist who has trained since age 10, performs the pole-jumping event. Coach Keung Wai-hong says women's share of his team rose from 20 to 40 percent since the 1990s, but he still asks women to take the music, citing their rhythm, and says men hold a significant physical advantage.¹ A South China Morning Post feature places Kwok's Girls in Tai Kok Tsui and dates the parent team to 1969.²⁸

Guangzhou and Guangdong

The best-documented girls' team in China is the women's squad of the Nanxing Hexingtang lion team (南興合興堂/南兴合兴堂, Cant. naam4 hing1 hap6 hing1 tong4, Mand. Nánxīng Héxīngtáng) in Baiyun (白雲/白云, Cant. baak6 wan4, Mand. Báiyún), Guangzhou. People's Daily reported in January 2023 that the village team dates from the 1980s and was mostly male. Coach Yu Weizhao began training a few girls in 2013, and Yu and coach Zhang Zheliang formally set up the women's team in 2019, with 20 members aged 10 to 18. Wu Shuxian, 15, played the head, Kuang Junyu, 15, the tail and Zhong Ziying, 14, the drum. The girls met cold looks, some were taken off the stage just before a show, and some cried over hard moves such as pole climbing. The coaches film practice and check each move second by second.³⁰

In 2021 the girls beat all-male teams for first prize at a Baiyun district contest, and in 2022 they won the junior group for Guangzhou at the 16th Guangdong Games. China Daily adds that they have pink and purple heads, one modelled on the Yue opera figure Mu Guiying, and that with few bookings at first the coaches chose to win awards and then ask for acceptance.³¹ China Daily's first page says that as of 2018 the Hexingtang team had only male participants, and that coach Zhang Zheliang, 26, recalls taking in a few girls as fewer young people practised. Some villagers, it adds, saw this as defiance of tradition, cursed the girls and took their props, and on the first day of the Chinese new year a family that had hired the team chased the performers away on discovering they were girls.³¹

An AFP report of January 2025 visits the Lingdong troupe in an ancestral temple courtyard in Shantou, with about 80 members aged 13 to 33 and about 20 of them women. Coach Lin Likun says the troupe believes in equality and admits some mockery, and dancer Lin Xinmeng, 18, trains with jogging, squats and weights. Some women give up because of the physical demands.⁸ A pink drunken-lion act by two Raoping senior-high girls went viral in February 2025, though that page was seen only as a headline.³²

Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam and Indonesia

Malaysia

Malaysian sources stress that lion dance is mixed by race as well as by gender. Tan Yee Lee of Seremban (known as Master Tan, 陳教練/陈教练, Cant. can4 gaau3 lin6, Mand. chén jiàoliàn) has a verified Instagram account that showed about 22,100 followers on 9 October 2026, and its bio gives her titles as head master and trainer of lion dance and founder (創辦人/创办人, Cant. cong3 baan6 jan4, Mand. chuàngbànrén) of the Rantau Dragon and Lion Dance Association (森州晏斗龍獅體育会).³³ China Press reported that the Malaysia Book of Records certified her as the country's first female lion dance coach at a Seremban mini lion-head painting contest and certification ceremony, where Rasah MP Cha Kee Chin said, citing figures from her, that the association has about 40 senior members, 80 percent of them Indian Malaysian, and a photo caption says she led a group of women on gongs and drums.^21,20 A post on her account dated 20 September 2026 says the association received a Shining Cultural Heritage Mastery Award 2026; no organiser or press report on that award was found.³⁴ The 2025 Genting documentary says girls at the Qunle Sports Association later jumped onto the high poles, with no discrimination by gender or race.JIWA SINGA @ 08:35³⁵ Siti Aishah Mohd Farulnizam, 17, a Malay Muslim student in Penang, plays the head for the Meihu cultural and sports association. She went viral on TikTok in January 2023, and says she first worried her father would not allow it because she is a girl, and that falls and head knocks are normal.³⁶ A 20-year-old Muslim dancer from Sabah in the documentary says her team treats lion dance as sport, not religion or race.JIWA SINGA @ 09:30³⁵ A Bernama report of a Xinhua story, dated 16 November 2024, describes Adzwin Puteri Faizal, 18, a Malay dancer from Rawang who plays the tail for the Yong Jun Lion Dance Association, led by master Chan Yong Zhen, and has been in the troupe five years. Chan says it was once hard for women and for people of other ethnic groups to learn lion dance, but that has changed, and he tells doubters, "Don't underestimate her because she's a girl." The troupe's members are Malaysians of several ethnic groups aged 10 to 18.³⁷ In Kuantan, Hillary Ng Jing Xi, 14, drums for two Malay teenage boys who dance on poles.³⁸

The aunties are older women. Sin Chew Daily reported on 30 January 2023 that the Macallum Street Ghaut residents' association in Penang had formed a lion troupe of women aged 40 to 78, believed to be the first of its kind in Malaysia. Chairman Lim Poh Aun said it formed during the Covid lockdown and is made up of housewives and working women, and Chew Lay Pheng, who carries the head, said the team was happy with its progress after a year of practice. The women also play gong and cymbals, one man drums while a woman trains on the drum, and so far they perform only at the association's events, after a debut days earlier at its Chinese New Year celebration.³⁹ The R.AGE video adds that a 55-year-old assistant nurse holds the head, her body aches the next day, and the women have known each other for over 40 years, built their temple and give free food to people in need.R.AGE video on Penang's lion dance aunties @ 00:41⁴⁰

Singapore

Singapore's heritage inventory entry for lion dance (ICH-016, April 2018) lists learners as students, national servicemen and young men and women alike.⁴² The Vibes, citing Mothership, reported on 10 February 2024 on Nuraini Adeya Yahya, 15, who has trained at NamYang Lion Dance Centre for about two years and plays the head. The article says she is the only Malay and the only female member, and gives troupe leader Peter Goh's view that race and gender do not matter in lion dance. Some of her Muslim friends called her a "betrayer" and her family at first objected, but her father now approves.⁴³ No all-women Singapore troupe turned up.

Vietnam

Besides the Bến Tre troupe, Tú Anh Đường in Ô Môn, Cần Thơ, began training women on the plum-blossom poles (mai hoa thung) in 2008. By 2018 Tuổi Trẻ counted 22 women record-holders, five of whom could do pole and pole-climbing lion.⁴⁴ An AFP report of February 2021 names Lê Yến Quyên, 27, a pharmacist and taekwondo black belt, as the first woman, says she took three months to master high poles, and says the community resisted women at first.⁴⁵ For poles, see Chapter 12.

Indonesia

Searches in Indonesian found no source describing a rule against women in barongsai. Good News from Indonesia dates the ban on Chinese religion, beliefs and customs to Presidential Instruction No. 14 of 6 December 1967, which applied to everyone, and says President Abdurrahman Wahid revoked it. The article mentions no women or girls.⁴⁶ Suara Surabaya reported on 12 January 2014 that 30 female students of Soedirman University in Purwokerto were taking part in the World Hong Kong Luminous Dragon and Lion Dance Championships at the Hong Kong Coliseum. The article gives no final placing.⁴⁷ Whether Indonesian national events have a women's division was not found.

Women in competitions

Women compete in their own divisions and in open ones against men.

Mixed teams are the norm in open divisions. The US Traditional division is open to all, and older international rule texts list men's and women's groups.^26,52 At Macau, MGM's 2018 release lists a Male Lion Dance Championship (12 teams) beside the Female Traditional one, so that contest ran men's and women's titles side by side.⁴⁹ The 2023 US Female results are images on the federation page, so winners are not recorded here. At Genting, Malaysian media reported that more than half of the American team's drummers were women.⁵¹ Leung's White Crane says it has won worldwide titles with an all-female team, which is its own description.¹⁸ Not every women's team competes: Gund Kwok does not enter contests, because a member told Avaunt that competing does not fit its mission.¹² More Macau women's titles, from 2014, 2016 and 2019, are under How teams handle the old rules now. Head and tail rules are in Chapter 14.

Women as sifus, coaches and drummers

A sifu (師傅/师傅, Cant. si1 fu2, Mand. shīfu) is a master or teacher. Women hold the title or lead teams in several places: Tan at Gund Kwok; Susan Yee, a sifu at the Yau Kung Moon Kung Fu Institute in San Francisco, who told AARP that lion dance was a male thing in the early days and who now prefers to teach;⁴ Lai Yun-ting at Kwok's Girls;¹ Tan Yee Lee at the Rantau Dragon and Lion Dance Association in Malaysia;²⁰ and Wah Lum's women-led school.²⁵

Music was the old open door. Women are recorded on cymbals and gongs when they could not touch the lion, on background drums in Hong Kong, and on drums in Baiyun, Kuantan and the San Francisco team at Genting.^1,4,30,38,51 Gund Kwok's lions at the January 2017 Boston Women's March were backed by six women on drums, and in Taipei in 2014 the woman studying beside Avaunt was a music student learning the lion dance drum.¹² A female band member in the Xiao Feihong profile says cymbals leave your hands with calluses but are worth it for the travel and the people you meet.Xiao Feihong profile @ 09:07¹⁰ Drum patterns are in Chapter 7.

This guide looked for a woman called the queen of the drum, 嶺南女鼓王/岭南女鼓王 (Cant. ling5 naam4 neoi5 gu2 wong4, Mand. Lǐngnán nǚ gǔwáng), and found no article, record or profile using that title, so the guide does not use it. A documented holder of the title would be a good addition. Leadership can also be managerial: Nanfang+ (Southern Daily) headlined a 20 May 2024 interview with Ouyang Xiuming (歐陽秀明/欧阳秀明, Cant. au1 joeng4 sau3 ming4, Mand. Ōuyáng Xiùmíng) as the fourth-generation manager (主理人, Cant. zyu2 lei5 jan4, Mand. zhǔlǐrén) of Hong Kong's Ha Kwok Cheung Dragon and Lion Dance Team (Chapter 12).⁵³ The article says she was born into a martial arts family, trained under her father, practised lion-dance drumming with her mother and joined the troupe in her early teens.⁵³ She says that after taking over she took its performance business into Shanghai in 2010 and turned the family-run martial arts hall into a company with written rules and set roles, and that the troupe opened training bases in Zhaoqing in 2021, Gaoming in 2022 and Zhuhai in 2023, with a Foshan site of about 3,000 square metres for training and lion-head making, 獅人夢工場/狮人梦工场 (Cant. si1 jan4 mung6 gung1 coeng4, Mand. shīrén mènggōngchǎng), due in July 2024.⁵³ The interview gives no year for her takeover; the earliest date it ties to her is the 2010 Shanghai move. It does not say how she is related to the Ha family or discuss her gender.⁵³

Film and media

A short documentary on Gund Kwok by Xudong Liu, 19 minutes, screened in a package of short films at the San Francisco Documentary Festival in 2023. The festival listing says it profiles the troupe, which it calls the first women's lion dance troupe in the US and describes as founded by Tan and fifteen other Asian women who aimed to break stereotypes about their strength and image.⁵⁴ The short film The Lions of Chinatown by Law Chen, listed in June 2018, follows a young woman named Sara who is ending a five-year trial period with Hung Ching, the Chinese Freemasons lion crew in New York, in the hope of becoming an official member and taking the head, a role the listing calls traditionally male. The listing gives no surname, runtime or festival dates.⁵⁵ A South China Morning Post video shows a Los Angeles team with a full female lion, women lifting women, and its captain, Cassandra Lee, calling her dancers lionesses.The lion dancing women reinventing a Chinese tradition @ 01:05⁵⁶ A New York school documentary includes a woman raised in Chinatown who says few women danced before and now many do, and that girls can be as strong as men.Generations leap @ 04:57⁵⁷ A Seattle profile says lion dance was once all male and now girls dance and play music.Lion Dance: The Art of a Culture @ 02:03⁵⁸

NPR (2014) and AARP (2024) carried Gund Kwok, and AFP carried the Shantou and Vietnam stories.^3,4,8,45 Clips also go viral: Siti Aishah on TikTok, the Genting dancer, the Raoping girls.^32,36,51 Fiction uses the same figure. A Vietnamese reviewer's plot summary of a Chinese animated film has a girl lion dancer as the previous champion and the tournament's public face, whose parents dislike her dancing and whose coming match is her last. That is plot, not documentary.⁵⁹ Most pieces are framed as breaking tradition and centre one dancer or troupe, and many record the old rule only through an older person's memory. Avaunt makes a similar point about writing on Boston, which she finds uses a liberating tone and stresses strength and empowerment.¹²

Recent coverage keeps the same frame. Boston.com's report on the Chinatown Lunar New Year parade, published 2 March 2026, calls Gund Kwok the first all-women Asian lion and dragon dance troupe in the United States and quotes Tan on the old belief that women were too weak to learn lion dance: "We're here to prove that's not the case."⁶⁰ NPR's February 2025 report on the East Wind Foundation, a youth group in Los Angeles's Chinatown, says lion dance was long male because it was physically demanding and seen as taboo for women, and that girls now join, some after friends or siblings.⁶¹

How teams handle the old rules now

• Open admission. NamYang's leader, the Vancouver Chinese Lion Dance Association and Chow's Toronto team all take women. Chow's team is half women, with four or five girls in a typical eight-person show.^6,7,43 The blog of Chau Luen Athletics in Vancouver argues that lion dance and kung fu are open to anyone willing to learn, and it profiles Leanne Yu, who came back to training in her thirties and danced the lion for the first time in the 2024 Chinatown parade.⁶² In Rawang the Yong Jun Lion Dance Association takes Malaysians of several ethnic groups, and its master tells doubters not to underestimate a dancer because she is a girl.³⁷
• Separate women's teams. Gund Kwok and Nuwa, Kwok's Girls, the Baiyun girls and the Ladies Lion Dance Team at Shao Lin Hung Gar in Vancouver are all-women groups.^1,7,24,30 The South China Morning Post's Young Post named four Kwok's Girls in April 2025: Lam Hoi-hei, 25, Lai Yun-ting, 28, Li Tsz-yan, 25, and Yeung Nga-man, 23, who controls the head. It dates the parent team, led by Andy Kwok Man-lung, to 1969 and says the women hope to qualify for contests including Genting.⁶³ The Vancouver blog says an all-women lion team and a dragon team both performed in the 2024 Chinatown parade.⁶²
• Men-only clubs persist. The Tyee called the Hon Hsing club men-only in 2019, and Eugenia Chau, who founded a mixed club, said some clubs do not teach women.⁷
• Mixed clubs with few women. At the New York Chinese Freemasons club, a 2017 news report cited by Avaunt counted three active women among about sixty dancers. Its woman instructor, Prima Lai, said the lion head is supposed to bring luck and that bleeding is bad luck. Avaunt also cites Madeline Slovenz's 1987 study of New York clubs, in which a sifu warned against stepping over a lion's tail laid on the floor and called it "especially bad" for a woman.¹²
• Audiences. Cassandra Lee says traditional audiences look down on women dancers, while immigrants respond warmly because it reminds them of home.⁵⁶
• Faith. The Sabah dancer says she separates sport from prayer, non-Muslim teammates enter temples in her place, and she filmed the inside of a lion head to show her family it has nothing to do with what is forbidden to Muslims.³⁵
• Changing language about the taboo. Young Post's feature on Kwok's Girls says lion and dragon costumes were consecrated and females were once considered "unclean" in some Chinese religions and kept from holy objects, and that these beliefs no longer apply to most modern ceremonies.⁶³ In Malaysia the master Siow Ho Phiew is quoted in a February 2019 Malaysia Airlines magazine feature as saying that it is now common to find female performers and that there are no taboos, because lion dance has become a sport that everyone can take part in.⁶⁴ Lion Rock Tales and the New York instructor describe the belief as still alive, so the picture varies by team.
• Schools and youth programmes. In Taiwan, Al Jazeera reported in 2022 that many school teams now receive government funding, though Qiu Zifang, 18, who joined her high school team after first seeing the dance at a temple, was one of few women at a Taichung practice and suggests the strength and agility some routines need may be one reason.⁶⁵ Avaunt's teacher in Taipei, Chin-Chang Yeh, told her class in 2014 that more women were learning but men still dominated.¹² In Vancouver, a dancer writing in 2019 teaches with a partner, and many of their students are girls and nonbinary people.⁶⁶
• Women's divisions at contests. GMA reported on 13 November 2016 that a Philippine women's team won the female traditional category at MGM's Macau contest with 8.90, ahead of Macau and Malaysia, and that its coordinator said the team had also won in 2014 and placed second in 2015.⁶⁷ MGM's releases list a Female Traditional title in 2018 and 2019, the 2019 one won by Shenzhen Fuhai Qiaotou with a Hong Kong Hung Kuen Lee Yun Fook team second and Zhong Yi Kung Fu Association of the United States third.^49,68

Head weight, training and safety

The reported weights do not agree, and they measure different things.

The harder load is the two-person work. In pole jumping the second dancer carries both the first dancer and the head, and one dancer often lifts the other by the waist.^1,8 Keung says men hold a significant physical advantage, and Hillary Ng in Kuantan says she is not strong enough to lift a partner.^1,38 Others answer with training. Lin Xinmeng does jogging, squats and weights, Aiping Schneider of Gund Kwok says proper training and enough exercise make it possible, and AARP notes that dancers hold a horse stance, a deep wide squat, through a show.^4,8 Avaunt, who joined a Gund Kwok warm-up, describes laps and circuits, 180 sit-ups counted off by nine dancers, abdominal holds and a long horse stance, and compares it to military basic training.¹² The Baiyun coaches film practice and check it second by second.³⁰ On safety, Siti Aishah and the Kuantan teenagers call falls and head knocks normal, and one US captain's mother thought the dance too dangerous and for boys.^36,38,56 No source read reports injury rates by sex. Movement basics are in Chapter 8.

Voices of women dancers

These are mostly paraphrases of what dancers told reporters and researchers, with a few short direct quotes.

• Cheng Imm Tan, Boston. Calls the troupe a path to physical, mental and emotional empowerment.⁴
• Aiping Schneider, Boston. Says dancing as the lion makes you feel strong.⁴
• Lai Yun-ting, Hong Kong. On why she dances: "I just want to prove myself."¹
• Lam Wing-yan, Hong Kong. Has dreamed since childhood of jumping the poles.¹
• Cassandra Lee, Los Angeles. Her mother said it was too dangerous and for boys; some audiences ask whether she is strong enough.⁵⁶
• Siti Aishah, Penang. Worried her father would refuse because she is a girl.³⁶
• Lin Xinmeng, Shantou. Has heard people say a girl cannot lead a lion.⁸
• The Baiyun girls. Ask who says girls are worse than boys, and hope more young people will join.³⁰
• Helen Woo, Boston, 1937. Recalled thinking, "if the boys can do it, so can we."¹²
• Prima Lai, New York. Told a reporter in 2017 that few people want to be the one to say they should forget what their ancestors told them.¹²
• Shaina Lu, Boston. Told Avaunt she sought an all-women group after feeling shut out of men-run schools in Chinatown and finding a Shaolin summer programme hostile to women.¹²
• Li Tsz-yan, Hong Kong. Told Young Post: "We will probably lose to male dancers, but we look so cool."⁶³
• Leanne Yu, Vancouver. "Lion heads are more awkward than heavy to hold."⁶²

Milestones