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Oct 05, 2023

Women Are On The Rise As Leaders Of Top Research Universities

Cover of The Women's Power Gap 2021-2023 Progress Report. In 2023, women make up

Cover of The Women's Power Gap 2021-2023 Progress Report.

In 2023, women make up 30% of R1 university presidents — an increase of 7% since 2021. Within this period, over 53% of new presidents were women. This is good news, but the numbers should be even higher given the progress that women have made in the past few decades.

Women have been the majority on college campuses since the 1980s, and today they earn 58% of undergraduate degrees, 62% of master's degrees, and over 50% of PhDs. However, the presidency at the nation's elite universities has been—and remains—predominantly men and white. Although we often hear university boards say that there are not enough women in the pipeline to the presidency, that's just not true.

The pipeline to university leadership

According to a new report by Women's Power Gap (WPG), "women comprise 39% of provosts, but drop to 30% of presidents." Moreover, nearly 40% of the nation's universities have never had a woman president.

Andrea Silbert, president of EOS Foundation and Women's Power Gap

According to WPG president and report author Andrea Silbert, "It is heartening to see more women leading our nation's elite universities. This speaks to an increased awareness of the importance of having academic leadership that represents the diversity of the student population it serves. Women have outnumbered men on college campuses for decades, so it's high time we’re starting to see more gender and racial diversity reflected in the highest roles in academia."

The WPG report also explored racial and ethnic diversity in R1 university presidencies and found that it is still lagging, and especially for women. Among the 30% of women R1 university presidents, 24% are white women with only 3% being Asian, 2% Black, and 1% Latina. Among men who lead R1 universities, 70% are white, with Black men making up 7% of the group, Asian men accounting for 6% and Latino men representing 4% of the leaders.

One of the keys to diversifying the presidency of R1 universities in terms of gender and race is having diversity on boards of trustees as boards choose presidents. Unfortunately, boards of trustees of colleges and universities are overwhelmingly men and white. The WPG report found that fewer that 30% of the R1 university boards were chaired by women and that the presence of women in general was not representative of women on campus and in society.

The report makes several recommendations that author Silbert believes will lead to more gender and racial diversity in the R1 university presidency. First, she recommends that R1 universities stop trying to change women to fit into the institution and instead change the institution to be more inclusive of women, and especially women of color.

Second, Silbert found that R1 universities are not transparent in disclosing information on board diversity — again boards choose presidents and thus their diversity is essential to leadership diversity. She suggests that the federal government collect board diversity demographics in its annual IPEDS survey, and even provides a matrix for collecting such data.

Third, Silbert suggests that R1 universities work to remove bias from the search process by including chief human resource officers on presidential search committees to ensure that language used to demean women, and women of color in particular, is challenged, and that the most objective measures are used to judge candidates, rather than personal traits.

As Felecia Commodore, a faculty member at Old Dominion University has stated, "A number of factors contribute to [the] low percentage [of women in the presidency], including barriers within the college presidential pipeline – such as exclusion from networks that provide mentorship – reward and promotion structures that are not equitable across genders, and bias against women in academic leadership roles."

The report ends with a challenge to those R1 universities that have never had a woman president and especially those that are on the verge of searches to consider hiring a woman to lead them into the 21st century.