"Yes, I am a feminist. I'm proud to be a feminist."
Shirley Tilghman, who was recently named the University's 19th president and first female president, confidently affirms being both feminist and liberal — adjectives that were used to describe her in a 1996 New York Times profile.
Though she reserves judgement on other topics, Tilghman made clear that she is a staunch opponent of federal funding for conferences that do not include women on their panels.
In a recent New York Times article, Tilghman was criticized for moderating her bold stance on tenure. But on the issue of women in academia, she is sticking to her guns.
"I have pretty strong views about that," she said.
Women represent close to 50 percent of new Ph.D.s in the life sciences, according to Tilghman. She said she believes it is absurd that research panels are not representative of that proportion.
"It is very difficult to understand how it is possible that there remain meetings in which there are no women participants as speakers," she said in an interview last week.
As University president, Tilghman will have major influence on deciding which panels receive funding.
Because fields such as physics have a far smaller proportion of women than fields like biology, Tilghman said she could not enforce a required number of women for panels.
"What I would require is some evidence that there's been a good-faith effort to consider women," she explained.
Tilghman said her views stem from comparing conferences in molecular biology held in different years. In 1988, she said, she chaired a conference featuring 45 speakers, and one-third of them were women. She added, however, that two years later a male colleague chaired the same meeting and of the 45 speakers, just two were women.
For Tilghman the impact of such male-dominated panels is significant and may discourage women from careers in the sciences. "It's important because these conferences have audiences of undergraduate women," she said, "and it can have a big impact on their careers if there are no women on the panel."
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