Women make up about 60 percent of undergraduate and graduate students in the United States, about 47 percent of all faculty, and well over half of mid- and upper-level college administrators, according to figures from an association of human-resources officers in higher education.
Then they hit the glass ceiling: Forty-four percent of provosts, and less than a third of college presidents, are women, according to a 2022 study by the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources.
The continuing underrepresentation of women in the president’s role was also a key takeaway from the American Council on Education’s 2023 study of campus leadership. “Progress has been made in increasing representation for women in senior roles — but with an increase of just under 10 percentage points since 2006,” the study concluded.
Those statistics aren’t surprising to Suzanne M. Rivera, president of Macalaster College, in St. Paul, Minn., since 2020. Many have ascribed the gender inequity in higher-ed leadership to a “leaky pipeline,” Rivera said, meaning women give up their pursuit of leadership roles to have children and raise a family.
In an interview, Rivera cited a different reason for women being underrepresented in leadership: The pathway to the presidency, she said, is “a hostile obstacle course that is rife with sexism and even misogyny.”
Rivera, a Cuban American, is one of three women, all in their first jobs as college presidents, who spoke with The Chronicle about their journey to campus leadership, why the job is particularly hard for women and people of color, and how they and the colleges they lead are often viewed through a political lens in a way that their white, male colleagues are not.
“When people evaluate your performance or assess a decision you’ve made,” Rivera said in an email follow up, “it’s not merely ‘the president did this.’ Instead it’s ‘the woman president’ or the ‘Latino president’ or the ‘gay president’ or whatever. That extra layer of responsibility, knowing that everything you do may be viewed as some sort of referendum on the capacity of people like you to be leaders, can be a distraction.”
The group — including Lori S. White, president of DePauw University, in Greencastle, Ind., and L. Song Richardson, president of Colorado College, in Colorado Springs — met through various college-leadership events and formed a tight friendship, in part because of the similarity of their situations. All are people of color leading liberal-arts colleges, and each took somewhat nontraditional routes to the presidency instead of serving as a provost. Rivera, for example, has worked for a quarter-century in higher education, in research administration. (The three took part in a panel discussion on female leaders in higher education that was part of The Chronicle’s Women Leading Change Program in April. A similar virtual event is planned for September.)
There are relatively few people that look like the three of us as college presidents. What kind of message does that send?
It’s not their professional backgrounds that held them back from considering the presidency sooner, said White, but the lack of representation among campus leaders of people with whom they could identify.
“None of us imagined or envisioned ourselves as college presidents,” said White, who is African American and has worked in higher education for nearly 40 years, in student affairs. “The fact that there are relatively few people that look like the three of us as college presidents,” she said, “what kind of message does that send to women leaders in higher ed about the possibility of them becoming college presidents?”
Richardson, who is Black and Asian American, said women may also be less likely to apply to positions if they don’t feel like they meet or even exceed all of the qualifications listed for that job. “Men are more prone to apply,” she said, “even if they meet none of the criteria.”
“So whenever I speak to groups of women, I say, ‘Apply,’” Richardson said. “Don’t wait until you meet every single criteria, because so many of our trajectories are different anyway.”
Men and Mentorship
While all three women say the lack of diversity in leadership can be a deterrent to women seeking advancement, they noted an irony: Their own best mentors have often been white men.
A key mentor who helped elevate Richardson’s career is Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school at the University of California at Irvine when Richardson began teaching there in 2014.
“I wanted to be at UCI Law because I really wanted to be at the school that Erwin had just begun,” she said. Chemerinsky not only mentored Richardson, she said; he became an advocate for her career, tapping her for key roles, such as chairing a search committee and eventually naming her associate dean. When Chemerinsky was hired as dean of the University of California at Berkeley law school, Richardson took over his role at Irvine, first as interim dean, at Chemerinsky’s recommendation, she said.
“I could easily have made a judgment that Erwin, for instance, would never be the mentor he turned out to be,” said Richardson, whose research was focused on unconscious bias. “My whole career has been like that,” she said. “Most of the mentors — not all of them, but most of them — have been white men, which I find fascinating.”
Even after making it to the president’s office, the women said they have faced a raft of challenges, many of them relating to how people perceive and work with women and people of color in leadership.
One problem White identified: People of color on campus may not feel she is a strong enough advocate for issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion, despite her decades of work supporting those issues, because “they don’t observe all the places where we actually are advocating.”
At the same time, White said, when she is supporting DEI among more-conservative constituents like alumni or the board, they “often think that we are too radical, even if we are advocating for similar positions that our white counterparts might have done before us.”
“It’s heard differently when I’m saying it,” White said.
Sometimes misconceptions about the president can spill over onto the institution, Richardson said. For example, people have questioned her academic credentials and whether she really earned a degree from Yale Law School because they can’t find her graduation date online. Then, when Colorado College announced it would no longer participate in the U.S. News & World Report’s college rankings, it was interpreted by some, Richardson said, as the college backing away from academic rigor in favor of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
“People’s assumption is, because of who I am and what my background is … that we must be moving in a ‘woke’ way, whatever people might think that means,” she said.
Mischaracterizing actions with political motivations is one problem, but the women also point to more-extreme reactions to their leadership.
“Whenever I say anything public,” Rivera said, “the vitriol that comes back — online through emails, through phone, voice-mail messages to the college, letters sent to my house — it’s always cruel, even vulgar, to a degree that I think would be shocking for a lot of male leaders, because they’re not subjected to it.”
Rivera and her peers said they have developed strategies to try to lessen the impact of such messages. At the beginning of her tenure, for example, Rivera said she pledged to respond to every message she got, no matter the content or the sender’s relationship to the university. Now, if a disturbing response comes from someone with no connection to the college, Rivera doesn’t respond.
“If they’ve been vulgar or mean or threatening,” she said, “I no longer feel that it’s my job to try to persuade them to come around to my point of view, and I just let it go. That’s important for my own self-preservation.”
In the long run, though, governing boards that say they want more-diverse leadership need to be prepared to step up and support women and people of color, Rivera said.
“A lot of boards, as well-meaning as they are when they hire women presidents, are not necessarily prepared to support them, because they may be unaccustomed to this level of abuse,” she said.
One thing boards should think about is how to decide when and how to take a public stand to show support for the president, Rivera said. “A board doesn’t want to undermine the authority of the president, " she said. “They don’t want to be seen as having to come in and rescue you every time somebody says a mean thing.”
In the long run, if boards don’t back up their commitments to diversity, underrepresented people will continue to be deterred from seeking the role of president, Rivera said.
“There are ways in which female leaders are just subjected to so much abuse, and I think that takes a toll,” she said. “It would be very reasonable for a woman leader to say, I don’t need this.”
