Women at the Helm

Over a span of two hours, these grand dames of the academy discussed many structural and cultural barriers facing women in higher education today, including the pitfalls of the tenure system, the narrow range of personality types accepted in female leaders, the importance of mentoring and the burden of balancing work and family.

Excerpts from the discussion follow.

KEEPING UP THE MOMENTUM

Judith Rodin: When increasing diversity] is self-conscious, a lot of very interesting things happen. I don’t mean that in a negative way. It’s just that it was very much on everyone’s mind. I think now the challenge is—and Shirley’s done something marvelous in appointing so many women deans and a woman provost—because I have seen, as we have achieved more success for women, people paying less attention to. It is more accepted and more obvious. But as I look at the numbers, the numbers are slipping again, particularly on the faculty.

A DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE

Mary Patterson McPherson: What the woman can do that may be somewhat different is she can ask perhaps a set of questions or raise a set of issues that had not necessarily been asked before or raised before at an institution that hasn’t had that history. But I don’t always think that it’s necessarily the fact that a woman is there that women are going to be better treated. There are men presidents who have brought women along in fantastic ways and have really changed the culture of institutions. And that’s been extremely important.

Emily C. Lloyd: But I do think having a woman president opens things up because, all of a sudden, every other job becomes thinkable as a job for a woman.

BREAKING BARRIERS:

Judith Rodin: I love being a woman at the top. I think it’s pretty terrific and long overdue for my institution. So the first year I was always referred to as the “New Woman President.” The second year, I was the “Woman President.” And by the third year, all of the descriptors were gone...and I was that person who was knocking the most recent goal of the faculty.

Hanna H. Gray: One of the disadvantages is you don’t have a wife and that, therefore, there are a number of things that you have to do yourself...In the old days, it used to be that presidents’ wives had teas. They had teas for new members of the faculty, the new wives. Everybody wore gloves...And they took tours of presidents’ houses and all that kind of thing...And you do get the evil eye from some people for not doing these things, or for not opening your house for these tours. You know, you’re expected to be both yourself and your wife in a certain way. Now, the whole world is moving away from the quiet little teas and all the rest of it, so these things matter less and less. But there was a time when it mattered.

THE ODD WOMAN OUT

Judith Rodin (on being the only woman at a meeting of Ivy league presidents): I think they went out of their way to make me feel that it was not going to be any different just because I was a woman. And it was the first time in a long time in my career when I was so aware of being a woman. I never thought about it in so many of the other venues in which I traveled, my academic career—obviously I knew I was a woman. But the more senior I became, the less and less I thought of myself as a woman and the more and more I thought of myself as a scientist and a scholar and an administrator. I felt like a woman again, and it was very odd. And so having you [Shirley M. Tilghman] and [Brown University President Ruth J. Simmons] there, I no longer feel that way. And it has truly changed the dynamics.

A FINE LINE

Shirley M. Tilghman: You know, to be a leader there’s no question you have to have a certain level of aggression. I don’t think you can lead unless you’re prepared to be firm when it’s required and make tough calls when it’s required and deliver bad news when it’s required. And if you are uncomfortable doing any one of those three things, you can’t be effective, frankly, as a leader. But I think all three of those can be done with empathy, with compassion, with grace and without [being] in your face. And I think successful women leaders walk that line and sort of have the agression there under the surface because it’s very necessary to do those things.

Judith Rodin: I think women’s behavior and men’s behavior, if you put the identical behavior side by side, that that which is called aggressive in women may not be called aggressive in men. And I think we have all experienced that; [there is] a narrower range of what is viewed as acceptable. So I have early in my career, both as a scholar and more recently as a leader of an institution, decided not to worry about that—that I was going to try to be an excellent leader, that the attributes that characterized excellent leaders...are very similar in women and men. And that people would have to get comfortable with those attributes being expressed by women and that it was their problem not mine. So that’s sort of been my resolution of what I think is a very real perceptual and attributional issue.

Emily C. Lloyd: I do think that women, again as part of what’s the acceptable range, tend to do some of their toughest things privately, less publicly, than men sometimes do. And that creates a cushion that...”It’s all right if you do it, but I don’t want to have to watch you do it, because I’ll be horrified if a woman’s doing that.” And I think I watch other women, and I do think that they’re less public about some of the tough things they have to do.