Getting to the Top

In its Unofficial Guide listing, the Harvard-Radcliffe Women's Leadership Project courts participants with a disturbing observation: "you might notice that few women hold top-level positions in extracurricular campus organizations..."

If you flipped through the rest of the guide in the fall of 1991, you might not have noticed. That year, the presidents of The Crimson, the Lampoon, the Advocate and Phillips Brooks House Association--four of Harvard's oldest, most established organizations--were women. But in the fall of 1992, you might have noticed again. All four organizations had male presidents.

Of course, this is a poor way to gauge the concentration of women campus leaders. Four is a tiny sample size, and all of these groups have large hierarchies and a number of leadership positions.

But the Women's Leadership Project's observation shouldn't be ignored. In some campus groups, men always tend to hold more top positions than women. And the number of women leaders in any campus organization can fluctuate dramatically from year to year.

Just look at The Crimson masthead.

Of The Crimson's 40 executive editors this year, only 11 are women. Last year, nine of the Crimson's 34 executives were women. Even those numbers don't tell the whole story. Last year, women held half of the Crimson's news positions--including that of managing editor. This year, only one of the Crimson's executives in charge of news coverage is a woman.

Women are far from scarce in The Crimson building. The group of reporters elected this fall was predominantly female, and women make up more than half of our beat reporting staff.

But if history repeats itself, those women might not take leadership positions in the future. My "news comp class" in the fall of 1990 was roughly half women. When, two-and-a-half years later, it was time for my peers and me to assume the top offices, very few women remained.

When women first joined The Crimson--and for many years afterward--the newspaper's 14 Plympton Street building was often an uncomfortable place for them. Female editors released their frustration on the women's bathroom walls, scrawling graffiti of anger, anxiety and often support in bold magic markers.

In a massive renovation project two years ago, the old bathroom was gutted and replaced. Soon afterward, women began to refill the walls--for tradition's sake, mostly. The scribblings in our new women's bathroom are far less indignant, far more encouraging. One message, written by a returning Crimson alumna, notes how far women have come.

Yet sometimes we worry that we haven't come far enough. When Madhavi Sunder '92 wrote a senior thesis on women at The New York Times, she prefaced her paper with a description of her experience as a reporter and Associate Managing Editor at The Crimson. "Like most other competitive, professional daily newspapers," she wrote, The Crimson "operates on a masculine ethos style, and value-system..."

Trying to define that style and value system, women on The Crimson devise theories, searching for reasons why so few of us stay.

The cultural theorists Sunder cites in her thesis lend some insight. Nancy Chodorow asserts that girls form their gender identities by assuming maternal traits such as caring, nurturing and connectedness, while boys separate from their mothers and reject those same traits.

Carol Gilligan builds on Chodorow's theory, asserting that women and men use different languages--different voices--to speak about moral conflicts. And Rosabeth Moss Kanter says that in corporate leadership culture, traits associated with men are rewarded and perpetuated.

Applying theories like these to The Crimson is a difficult task, because generalization can be so dangerous. Take, for example, hypotheses about women in the newsroom atmosphere.

At the height of Harvard's presidential search two years ago, differences between two prevalent reporting styles became a running joke at the Crimson. One type of reporter was the "schmooze," known for long conversations with sources, skilled at cajoling information out of the less-than-willing-to-divulge.

Another was the hard-edged investigative reporter, who relishes in the thrill of the chase, in asking the tough questions, in nailing wrongdoers with incriminating evidence in the form of government documents.

Each member of the team that covered the presidential search--two men, two women--used both methods. But, according to one of those reporters, the women's main strength was in the schmoozing; the men, in general, were stronger in the hard-edged roles.

Depending on the big story at the time, depending on the editors in charge, tough-as-nails investigative reporting has been emphasized and deemphasized at The Crimson. But during my tenure here, the people who have gravitated to hard-edged reporting have been overwhelmingly male.

That's not to say that men don't often make terrific shmoozers. And it's not to say that women can't be great at combative journalism; some of the best investigative reporters in the country are women, including Nieman Fellow and Dallas Morning News reporter Olive Talley.

But if we pare away the exceptions, we might find a nugget of truth. Does our society tend to make women uncomfortable in an atmosphere that glorifies confrontation? Do cultural standards turn women away from reporting and, later, from leadership positions, which by their nature require a certain contentiousness? Do women shy away from Crimson editorial meetings--which are often heated and argumentative--for the same reason?

The problems women face at The Crimson are not unique to The Crimson. Other campus organizations confront similar cultural difficulties. Women face cultural barriers in classes and sections. In Harvard's sometimes confrontational, sometimes contentious discourse, women often struggle to make their voices heard.

But recognizing those problems doesn't bring us closer to removing them. And The Crimson has a responsibility to remove them. Before women can truly be equals in this organization--before the number of women who reach the top is proportional to the number of women who join in the first place--we need to make some cultural changes. The Crimson needs to accept and embrace more than one style of discourse in editorial meetings and in the newsroom.

It's time to read the writing on the bathroom wall.

Of the 40 Crimson executives this year, only 11 are women.