What Are the Biggest Challenges You’ve Faced as a Female Leader?

Mariko Silver

President, Bennington College

In my first year as president of Bennington College, I received some sage advice: Remember to distinguish clearly between interactions that are interpersonal and those that are inter-role; women leaders are more often expected to walk a tightrope between the two. Women leaders are expected to be both personable and authoritative, both analytic and affable, both warm (including being open to any question, no matter how off-putting) and clearly commanding.

A woman who is a physicist is more likely to be referred to as a “woman physicist,” whereas a male physicist — unless gender is directly relevant to the discussion — is called simply a physicist. This is often true of presidents as well. That “woman” modifier can imply many things. It can imply exceptional achievement (as in, one of only a few “women physicists”). It can also imply a suite of stereotypical characteristics including: warmth, a personal touch, and a (feminine) approachability.

In practice, this means that conversations with staff, faculty, and students can turn on a dime from inter-role (employer with employee) to interpersonal. When this happens, too often personal traits replace leadership capabilities as the metric by which women are judged.

Holding the line against this cultural tendency is vital to our ability to lead. It is also vital to cultivating environments where everyone — regardless of gender, race, class, etc. — is judged on the merits of their work. When women leaders resist the pressure to acquiesce to such cultural expectations, we grant permission to our colleagues (and students) to forge a path that is defined by their abilities. We create learning environments that are more just and conducive to success.

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Elaine P. Maimon

President, Governors State University

For the last 11 years, I have served as president of Governors State University, and for 11 years before that I was chief executive at two other universities. But no one, not even my biggest fans, would ever say that I’d be the obvious casting choice for the presidential role in the next movie blockbuster. Not only am I a woman, I’m also not tall. In addition, I tend to be openly enthusiastic, especially about ideas and students. One might think that enthusiasm would be a plus, but in the stereotypical world of presidential images, it often leads to put-down comments like, “Tell us what you really think, Elaine.” Finally, some might assume that a female English professor would lack the business acumen to lead a university.

So fighting stereotypes has been a major challenge in my leadership career. Theater training has helped. If you can’t dominate a room with your impressive height and baritone voice, you can learn other techniques for engaging various audiences. Even more important, you resolve to combat pernicious stereotypes everywhere.

Another challenge is the psychological tendency of other administrators and faculty to interact in terms of some hidden family drama. A senior university officer once told me outright that he had difficulty taking my suggestions because I reminded him of his mother. That made me keenly aware of various ghosts in the room. While focus is essential to presidential leadership, peripheral vision is also necessary.

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Judy K. Sakaki

President, Sonoma State University

Shortly after becoming president, I learned that I was the first Japanese-American woman appointed president of a four-year university in the country. A prominent elected official, when he learned this fact, asked me why it had taken so long. That’s a good question, one that deserves pondering.

As I’ve discovered, women presidents of color sometimes face challenges to their leadership that may not be so apparent to others. Some people still hold fixed ideas about leaders and how they should look and sound. Currently, only about 30 percent of our nation’s college and university presidents are women. For women presidents of color, the percentage is even lower. And, for Asian-American women presidents, the percentage is minuscule.

Women of color in higher education face a mix of implicit and explicit biases — not only on our path to leadership but even when our résumés run many pages. Years after I earned a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley and held senior cabinet level positions, I still had colleagues question my qualifications. Perhaps even more shocking were the racist and sexist statements that some work peers felt entitled to say, some directly to me. Since my appointment as president, I have been called many things, including a “genetically inferior weed.” I also was told that “No J-p from an internment camp will ever be my president.”

To challenge these attitudes, I believe it’s critical for higher-education leaders to appoint diverse search committees, to commit to having periodic implicit bias training, and to have diverse voices and perspectives around leadership tables. Most of all, we need to support, advocate for, and speak up if we witness biased treatment toward a colleague.

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Elizabeth Meade

President, Cedar Crest College

As the president of a women’s college, I spend about half of my time on a campus where teaching and learning is based on the reality that women are going to lead, are going to expect to be heard, and are going to be assertive in pursuing their goals. Each day, this environment of positive expectations reminds me what a gift this is for our students and for all of the women leaders among our faculty and staff and others in our campus community.

The other half of my professional life takes me beyond our campus, to local and regional communities where things can feel quite different. It’s safe to say that there is still a proverbial boys’ club lurking in each of America’s cities and towns. Sometimes, they exist through connections, networks, and an unofficial shorthand. Other times, the boys’ clubs present themselves in physical form as places where a small number of mostly white businessmen golf together, drink together, and do business together, often all at the same time.

I have to consciously interject myself into their conversations at public events, and find ways to get time with them one-on-one to achieve what the male presidents in my area can usually achieve with less effort. I must often work twice as hard to overcome the natural marginalization not just of women in leadership positions, but also of my institution, a small women’s college, in its place amid larger co-ed institutions and some of the sports-powerhouse universities throughout my region.

Indeed, the biggest challenge I face as a woman college president is needing to wrench open doors that might open automatically for my male counterparts. But I do this, and I make progress — as I lead, make myself heard, and assert myself in pursuing my goals.

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Roslyn Artis

President, Benedict College

Among the many challenges associated with being a female college leader, perhaps the greatest is the additional effort required to demonstrate competence and engender the support and confidence of the campus and community. While qualified by virtue of our credentials, experiences, and achievements, few women are fortunate enough to come into office with the presumption that they are highly skilled and competent to lead in the complex environment that is a college or university. Women often have to prove themselves in multiple ways before the scrutiny subsides.

Athletics, facility construction, and finance are examples of areas where women are presumed less than capable of managing. As a woman, before you are deemed capable of leading without unusually close monitoring, board intervention, supervision, or assistance, you have to prove your ability to understand all sports; negotiate a construction contract, including every aspect of the critical paths to completion, subcontractor relationships, indemnity, and vendor agreements; and maneuver complex financing agreements.

The presidency requires intellectual agility and strengths in a wide variety of areas, but few presidents have in-depth experiences in all aspects needed. Nevertheless, women are often held to an impossible standard of being experienced in every area. Any perceived deficits are amplified and used as examples of our inability to lead effectively.

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Susan Herbst

President, University of Connecticut

As a social scientist, I need to note that it is epistemologically impossible to know whether obstacles I’ve faced are due to gender or not. And that is of course one of the profound challenges of assessing female leadership. Anecdotally, I do think that female leaders can sometimes face a “double bind” because of gender: meaning when male leaders are aggressive, hard-charging, and exacting, they are often perceived as being “strong.” When female leaders exhibit the same qualities, it can generate a negative reaction because, for some, those characteristics are not seen as being stereotypically female.

To correct this, all leaders need to actively seek talented women for top jobs. Not simply because they are women, but because they are highly qualified and happen to be women. It is the single most important way to fundamentally alter a university. At my university, our chief of staff, general counsel, university architect, chief compliance officer, chief audit officer, chief privacy officer, vice president for research, Title IX coordinator, and seven of our 14 deans are women. They make change and set the tone for large swaths of the university every day, demonstrating what strong, imaginative women leaders can do once they have power and authority.

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Ana Mari Cauce

President, University of Washington

I’ve sometimes said I’m not a university president out of central casting, and that’s true in a number of ways — as a woman, as a Latina, as an immigrant, as a lesbian, even as a long-serving faculty member at the institution where I now lead. In all these respects, I am certainly not a typical case. Each of these overlapping aspects of who I am have, at times, presented challenges to success, and even to pursuing a path to university leadership in the first place. Sometimes those challenges were rooted in stereotypes, which are stubborn things.

My path to leadership was almost accidental — the result of saying “yes” when administrative opportunities presented themselves. In almost every case, these opportunities arose when the people — all men, incidentally — in those roles departed unexpectedly. But the first time I proactively threw my hat in the ring for a leadership role as a dean, I was told that I wasn’t temperamentally suited for deanship because I lacked prudence. I might even agree that “prudence” isn’t the first word that comes to mind about me, but one of the things that can increase diversity and representation in leadership is redefining and reimagining how we view leadership qualities with respect to gender.

All too often in academia, talented women and men are assigned different virtues. Men are “stars” while women are “hard working” — both great qualities for a leader to have. However, there is no reason a man shouldn’t succeed through prudence and perseverance or that a woman shouldn’t succeed through brilliance and magnetism. As a leader who is the product of my experiences — good and bad — I take seriously my obligation to create opportunities for all these different ways of succeeding and for doing away with the stereotypes that limit us all.

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Janet Dudley-Eshbach

President Emerita, Salisbury University

My route to the presidency was rather traditional. As I transitioned from faculty member to department chair, dean, provost and president, being a woman was in many ways advantageous. Administrators, search committees, and board members typically understood the importance of working toward gender equity in hiring and promotion. Yet long-held stereotypes at times were nothing short of shocking. During my first presidency, I had a major donor who came right out and said, “I just don’t think a woman should be a college president.” This was astounding, especially because the person who said this was herself a woman who had had a very successful career in business. My response to her was, “I hope to be the person who proves you wrong!”

Over my 22 years as a university president at two institutions, I was a strong and vocal advocate for my university’s agenda, projects, and the issues that I deemed important. What is considered admirable strength of character in a man can be perceived in a woman as irritating outspokenness. Assertiveness in women is not always well received.

In addition, students, faculty, alumni, staff and others commonly perceive that, as a female president, I would be readily accessible whenever there was a concern or complaint. The “mother figure” stereotype. Individuals seem to accept that a male president may be a bit aloof and less approachable. He’s very busy after all, isn’t he? But a woman can be seen as uncaring or harsh when she doesn’t have an open-door policy or when she refers a constituent’s concern to a dean of students or other staff member.

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Eileen Wilson-Oyelaran

President Emerita, Kalamazoo College

The biggest challenges I faced as a college president — declining enrollments in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and struggles to build a welcoming campus community in a world that was changing rapidly both demographically and technologically — had nothing to do with being a female college leader. How I chose to respond to these challenges was undoubtedly impacted by who I am: a woman of color. These two aspects of my identity (race and gender) are so intertwined that, in most instances if these were operative, it would have been very difficult to determine which of the factors was in play or how they intersected. Keenly aware of what some of the stereotypes might be, I began my presidency making it very clear that I understood both academics and finances, was not afraid of conflict, and could make a firm decision.

On a more superficial note, women must spend way too much time “looking the part.” A man can wear the same suit three days in a row and no one notices.