Beyond a Women’s Center

It’s now 2007, and one of Harvard’s resolutions for the year is to find its next leader. As the presidential search continues, so does renewed discussion of qualities Harvard will look for in its next president. The University should seek someone “controversial,” some suggest. Others throw around many an appealing adjective: diplomatic, dynamic, and progressive.

I would like to suggest another quality: female.

I can already hear the shouts of “sexism!” and “feminazi!” echo through the Yard. But if Harvard recognizes an injustice—on a global, national, or local level—the University should do what it can to fight this injustice. Even in modern society, women and men have not had equal opportunities to prove their competency as leaders. Therefore, Harvard, as a progressive institution, should give the politically underrepresented sex—women—a chance to do so.

Despite lofty rhetoric about progress and equality, the United States and Harvard lag well behind global averages in female political participation rates. Countries as varied as Bangladesh, Great Britain, and Turkey have all had female heads-of-state, but we have not. The global average female participation rate at a parliamentary level is 16.3 percent, according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union. The U.S. House—which currently has its highest number of female members ever, 71—only meets this percentage of 16.3 percent. The Senate’s female participation rate is an equally low 16 percent. Until 1994, when Judith Rodin became president of the University of Pennsylvania, no Ivy League university had ever had a woman leader. And in Harvard’s 370 years of existence, we still haven’t.

Assuredly, there exist both men and women who have academic backgrounds, leadership experience, and dynamism that would make them excellent Harvard presidents. A woman, however, would be the only candidate who had faced and overcome the obstacles that modern sexism presents: those that half of Harvard’s student body will likely face. Harvard has been trying, with limited success, to confront the problem through efforts such as the new Women’s Center. But a female president’s firsthand knowledge of how to overcome such obstacles would make her the best-equipped candidate to lead Harvard in promoting gender equality. She would also provide a strong role model for students, and perhaps help to boost the number of tenured FAS women professors, who currently make up less than 19 percent of FAS’s tenured professors.

Some might argue that hiring a woman specifically because she is female is reverse discrimination. They might say that candidates should be chosen because of experience and skills that they can bring to the job, without considering sex as a factor.

Candidates for any job should always be considered as individuals, and to deny that a person’s sex is a central part of who he or she is would be blatantly false. A 2005 study in the journal Social Behavior & Personality found “a gender bias in hiring and firing decisions…at the final-choice stage.” In today’s gender-conscious world, intentionally or not, an applicant’s gender will be a factor in the hiring process. Why not admit this—and admit that the sex of our president is going to have some obvious side effects?

Wherever possible, Harvard should use its celebrity status to combat discrimination and unequal opportunities. The choice to select a woman for its traditionally male, high-profile presidency would be a real and impressive step.



Justine R. Lescroart ’09, a Crimson editorial editor, is a Romance languages and literatures concentrator in Quincy House.