BEIJING — China’s Communist Party leaders will gather this fall for a closely watched congress to decide who will take the party into its eighth decade of power. Yet for all the speculation about who will emerge at the top of the ruling party, one result seems certain: Few, if any, will be women.

Not once since the Communists came to power in 1949 has a woman sat on the party’s highest body, the seven-member Politburo Standing Committee now led by President Xi Jinping. The 25-member Politburo has just two women, though that is the highest number since the Cultural Revolution, when the wives of the Chinese leader Mao Zedong and of Lin Biao, his designated successor, were given seats in 1969.

Despite China’s constitutional commitments to gender equality, discrimination remains widespread, academics and feminists say, summed up by the saying that a woman with power is like “a hen crowing at dawn” — an augur of the collapse of the family and state.

Mandatory early retirement for women doesn’t help. Women must retire up to 10 years earlier than men, on the assumption that they are the primary caregivers for grandchildren and elderly relatives. That removes them from contention just as their careers begin to peak.