When Cornell University’s new president takes office, in July, half of the Ivy League’s colleges will be led by women. Brown University’s female leader is its second in a row.
Over the past several years, a range of other institutions, including public flagships, liberal-arts colleges, historically black institutions, and community colleges have hired their first female presidents. They include the University of Virginia, Middlebury College, Alabama State University, and Pueblo Community College.
Despite the progress, including at some of the nation’s most elite institutions, women remain significantly underrepresented among college presidencies — and the numbers have barely budged. Women make up about a quarter of college presidents nationwide, a share that has remained about the same for at least a decade.
Women tend to make up greater shares of presidents at two-year colleges than at four-year institutions, according to the American Council on Education. About 33 percent of community colleges have women as presidents, compared with 23 percent of bachelor’s and master’s-level institutions, and 22 percent of doctoral institutions.
The fact that colleges still note, in news releases and other communications, that they have hired the first female president in their long histories is a sign that hiring women as leaders has yet to become the norm, says Judith S. White, president and executive director of Higher Education Resource Services, a nonprofit group that provides leadership training for women in higher-education administration.
“There are lots of institutions where they’re getting their first woman president,” Ms. White says. “We’ve been at this stage a long time. How long is that going to be the case?”
Cultural Shift
What would it take to quicken the pace of change?
The barriers, experts say, are both external and self-imposed. Gender stereotypes — sometimes held by male-dominated boards of trustees who don’t think women are capable of running complex institutions or of managing family and work commitments simultaneously — can work against female candidates. So can hiring practices, particularly when recruiting is done through informal, male-dominated networks.
Some women allow small deficits in skills, real or perceived, to make them unsure about their leadership abilities and whether a presidency is within their reach. Others choose not to pursue a presidency, seeing the job as all-consuming and too stressful.
For change to happen, sometimes a cultural shift is needed. At Brown, the climate for women started to improve four decades ago, because it had to. In 1975, Louise Lamphere, an assistant professor of anthropology in a department that was all-male when she was hired, filed a lawsuit charging the university with sexual discrimination after she was denied tenure. The lawsuit described a larger pattern of sexual discrimination at Brown, where few women were on the faculty, tenured or not. In settling the suit, which became a class-action case, Brown formed a committee to overhaul how it hired professors, evaluated tenure applications, and promoted faculty members. It also monitored the institution’s progress toward increasing gender equity.
At the time, tenured female professors made up just 1.6 percent of Brown’s faculty. Since then that proportion has slowly increased: to just over 9 percent in 1987-88, a little more than 13 percent in 1992-93, and just over 21 percent in the current academic year.
As part of observing its 250th anniversary, Brown held a discussion this month with women who lead or have led some of the nation’s top colleges.
“It might seem a little unusual for a university to be celebrating that they lost a lawsuit,” said Christina H. Paxson, Brown’s president, while moderating the discussion. But the settlement, she said, “was a victory for women at Brown.”
Ms. Paxson, who took office in 2012, was the first woman to become tenured in Princeton University’s department of economics. She later served as its chair and went on to become one of the first female deans of the university’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs before leaving for Brown.
Ms. Lamphere, now a professor emerita of anthropology at the University of New Mexico, is pleased that Brown decided to re-examine the impact of her case. Such legal battles, she says, made it possible for women to not only get tenure but also work their way up into the administrative positions that fed into the wave of female presidents. Their numbers were few, with women making up only 10 percent of college presidents in 1986, according to the American Council on Education’s study.
Among those early leaders is Nannerl O. Keohane, who became president of her alma mater, Wellesley College, in 1981. Ms. Keohane, who participated in the Brown discussion, was an associate professor of political science at Stanford University when she was offered the job at Wellesley. She went on to become the first female president of Duke University.
Ms. Keohane, now a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study, joined Drew Gilpin Faust, president of Harvard University, and Shirley M. Tilghman, a former president of Princeton, to talk about their pathways to the presidency and why more women aren’t following their lead.
Family issues remain a big barrier for women all the way through the pipeline, Ms. Tilghman said, because the academic work culture doesn’t match up with the flexibility that women say they need to take care of children or aging parents, among other responsibilities.
“We haven’t figured out how to get through those old expectations and those old cultural practices to make it possible for women to think about work and family as complementary,” Ms. Tilghman said. “Until we figure this out, I think we’re always going to be sort of running uphill.”
The leaders talked about how, in some ways, they had to change their habits to fit the demands of the presidency.
For Ms. Tilghman, a molecular biologist, that meant abandoning a key part of her training as a scientist: the practice of gathering lots of information and analyzing it herself. As president, she had to learn to delegate and let others do that for her as she focused largely on decision-making.
“When you come into a presidency,” Ms. Paxson told the audience, “you learn very quickly that everything you say and everything you communicate is observed and noted.”
Ms. Keohane said her on-the-job learning curve was very likely steeper than most when she became president of Wellesley. When she was hired, she hadn’t been a dean or a provost, positions from which many presidents, particularly women, come to a presidency. Even so, she said, “I didn’t doubt that I could do the job in my own style.”
Because they are women, the panelists agreed, their leadership style comes under extra scrutiny.
“Women are read as much more aggressive. I think you just have to be aware of that,” said Ms. Faust. “You have to be firm, you have to be clear, you have to not be angry. And if someone says you’re angry, you just have to live with that.”
Having more female leaders in higher education is important, they said, in part because it helps women see themselves in that role. “For any one of us to have the ambition to be a president of a major university was unimaginable when we were kids,” said Ms. Faust, a historian of the Civil War. “Little girls can now imagine themselves in all kinds of roles.”
Michael Cohea, Brown U.
“For any one of us to have the ambition to be a president of a major university was unimaginable when we were kids,” said Drew Gilpin Faust
(second from right), president of Harvard, at a public discussion this month with Nannerl Keohane (left, formerly of Duke and Wellesley),
Shirley Tilghman (formerly of Princeton), and Christina Paxson (Brown).
Roadblocks in Place
Sometimes women have encountered roadblocks that stem from men’s stereotypical beliefs about the college presidency.
Molly Corbett Broad, president of the American Council on Education, says her tenure as leader of the University of North Carolina system from 1997 to 2006 gave her insight into what women seeking leadership positions are up against.
Ms. Broad, the first woman to serve as president of the UNC system, says that when she first appointed a woman as a campus chancellor, her choice met with some derision from a board member.
“He said, ‘I thought we did that once already,’ " Ms. Broad says.
External factors certainly play a role in whether a woman advances in academe. But so do women’s own career decisions.
Some opt not to pursue the top job, in part because despite a president’s level of influence to outsiders the job appears to have few redeeming qualities. The work seems relentless, requiring presidents to be on duty around the clock, juggling multiple interests, and largely neglecting their family and friends. Women who serve as provosts, in particular, may decide that their best career move is to stay put.
“They don’t want to become presidents,” says Ms. Broad. They think about why they entered the professoriate, and when they see how the presidents spend their time — fund raising, attending to multiple constituencies on and off the campus — “it turns into ‘Who has the better job?,’ " she says.
Some women who end up as presidents did not seek out the job, or even the career opportunities that lead to it, but found themselves entertaining the prospect at someone else’s urging. Those who aren’t asked often don’t consider applying.
When Karen S. Haynes was an associate professor of social work at Indiana University, she decided she wanted to be the dean of a graduate school of social work. She was hired for that position on the University of Houston’s main campus in 1985, becoming the first female dean in the Houston system.
“I thought I would stay in the dean’s position,” she says. “I never wanted to be president.”
But a call from the system chancellor in 1995 changed her mind. He asked her to serve as interim president of the Victoria campus. He said he needed a leader who could repair the broken trust between administrators and faculty members there.
“These are things I know how to fix,” says Ms. Haynes, who credits her social-work background for training her in the social skills she has relied upon as president.
Her two-year stint as interim leader became a permanent job that lasted for seven more years. Then she sought out her current presidency, at California State University at San Marcos, part of a 23-campus system that now has six female presidents.
With two decades of presidential experience, Ms. Haynes strives to portray the job as a manageable one. She talks openly to women’s leadership groups about the tactics she employs to keep her work hours under control. “You have to think strategically,” she says, which often boils down to determining “where does the face of the president really need to be?”
Every six weeks, Ms. Haynes, who is married with three grown children, tries to block out a weekend when she won’t attend events. Vacations are of the unplugged variety, although her chief of staff makes sure she gets the few emails and other messages that truly can’t wait.
For women who want to be presidents there are hopeful signs, one of which is the likely wave of impending retirements among college presidents. The presidency, like the professoriate, is graying, which paves the way for women and minority hires that can diversify the field. The American Council on Education’s presidency study shows that three of five presidents are older than 60.
“Creating urgency is a big deal,” says Susan Madsen, a professor of management at Utah Valley University. “If the conversation dies down, we can’t think change will still happen. It most likely won’t.”
Women in presidencies bring a different perspective to groups dominated by men, and they ask different questions than their male counterparts — helpful traits in problem-solving environments, Ms. Madsen says. A scarcity of female leaders in academe, she adds, also sends the wrong message to undergraduates, 56 percent of whom are women.
“It’s just critical that male and female students and people on our campuses see that both men and women have equal value,” Ms. Madsen says.
That comes across more clearly, she says, when there’s parity at the top.
Correction (3/16/2015, 12:32 p.m.): This article originally misstated who was the first female dean of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. She is Anne-Marie Slaughter, not Christina Paxson. The article has been updated to reflect this correction.
Audrey Williams June is a senior reporter who writes about the academic workplace, faculty pay, and work-life balance in academe. Contact her at audrey.june@chronicle.com, or follow her on Twitter @chronaudrey.
