No women named Rhodes scholars at U. since 2003

But at Princeton, home to winners Nick DiBerardino ’11 and Mark Jia ’10, a female student has not received a Rhodes in eight years. This gender gap — one that President Shirley Tilghman has personally voiced concern over — continued even though women made up eight of Princeton’s 14 finalists for the scholarship this year.

Over the past 10 years, Princeton’s 15 winners have included only three women. Faculty fellowship advisers and previous Rhodes scholars cited the historical exclusion of women from the Rhodes scholarship as a possible reason for the disparity. Another factor may be that men and women pursue leadership roles differently, they said, but cautioned against jumping to conclusions about Princeton’s fellowship program.

This gender gap is less dramatic at the national level. Since 2001, 44 percent of more than 300 American Rhodes scholars have been female. The Rhodes Trust, created by Cecil Rhodes in 1902, selects roughly 80 students worldwide each year to study at Oxford for two or three years, including 32 American recipients.

As outlined in Rhodes’ will, scholars are chosen on the basis of their scholastic achievements, character and “his fondness of, and success in, manly outdoor sports; his qualities of manhood.” In recent years however, athleticism has been broadly interpreted to include other forms of extracurricular engagement.

This year, 837 of roughly 1,500 applicants overcame the first hurdle and received endorsements from their universities. From that pool, 209 were named finalists and invited to a round of interviews before a selection panel.

“Getting a balanced proportion of male and female candidates to interview is likely to result over time in a balanced selection of winners,” said politics professor Melissa Lane, who is a faculty fellowship adviser. “Though again, not necessarily in any one given year.”

Records of the number of men and women applying for and receiving endorsements from Princeton were unavailable, said Deirdre Moloney, director of fellowship advising.

“The fact that Princeton’s numbers show a surprising difference merits thought and investigation,” said David Robinson ’04, who won a Rhodes Scholarship in 2004. “I’m not sure whether it represents some deeper bias problem or not.”

Henry Barmeier ’10, the University’s sole Rhodes recipient last year, said Oxford’s stigma as an old men’s school might deter women from applying.

“As a first filter, women could be dissuaded from attending Oxford, which was a male-dominated institution for a long time (and depending on who you talk to, may still be overtly male-dominated),” Barmeier said in an e-mail.

Kate Buzicky ’02, who won the scholarship in 2001 — a year when both of the University’s winners were women — said the traditional sense of the Rhodes as an athletic-oriented award might not appeal to as many women.

“The only thing that I can think of that might be off-putting to some women is that the Rhodes talks about being physically active,” Buzicky said. “There are still some women who might not enjoy physical activity as much as a guy might.”

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Wilson School professor Nannerl Keohane, who serves as chair of the Steering Committee on Undergraduate Women’s Leadership, also cited the potential for lingering effects from the historical bias against women.

“If there has been, in the past, a bias against women applying for the Rhodes, it probably stems from the fact that Cecil Rhodes himself never thought women were qualified to hold his scholarship,” Keohane said in an e-mail.

When Keohane graduated from Wellesley College in 1961, she was ineligible to apply for a Rhodes Scholarship because of her gender. Now, she leads the women’s leadership committee, which Tilghman created in December 2009 and charged with examining gender disparities in campus leadership roles and fellowship awards. After receiving a Marshall Scholarship to study at Oxford for two years, Keohane went on to become president of Wellesley and Duke University.

Evidence collected by the women’s leadership committee suggests that women are more likely to apply for prestigious awards if they receive specific encouragement to do so by faculty or older students, Keohane said.

“This seems to matter more for women than men, according to numerous alumni,” Keohane said.

Politics professor Alan Ryan, who along with Lane was appointed this year to serve as faculty fellowship advisers, said women seem more hesitant to face disappointment than men.

“I have some sense that women are more risk-averse than men — perhaps because they are generally more sensible, perhaps for deep genetic reasons — but that might make them less willing to have a go at something with a success rate of around one in 50,” Ryan said.

Buzicky said she does not think the disparity is anyone’s fault.

“When I was at Princeton, I did think there were sometimes a lot of girls and women that sold themselves short, but I don’t think you can blame anyone,” Buzicky said. “It’s individual psychology and so many different factors.”

Yet Ryan said he thought the low number of women in certain leadership roles does not necessarily indicate a major issue. As long as all students feel free to pursue their goals, it should not matter whether these include high-profile positions or more private achievements, he explained.

“There is a Princeton anxiety — perhaps because Princeton has had some very powerful women leaders,” Ryan said, citing Tilghman, Dean of the College Nancy Malkiel and former Provost Amy Gutmann as examples. Gutmann left Princeton to become president of the University of Pennsylvania. He added that there are “now worries that undergraduate women seem shy about standing for student government positions and the like.”

On the side of the selection committee, Barmeier said he has heard that a possible tendency for men to hold more traditional leadership positions might make them more appealing to application readers. This theory also suggests that the kinds of leadership roles women tend to hold do not translate as well on resumes.

Still, the small number of winners and finalists each year make it difficult to generalize, Lane cautioned.

“The process has an element of randomness to it, and so it does make you want to be on the lookout for possible bias,” Robinson said. “But the results as a whole need to be taken with a grain of salt because there is some sense of arbitrariness.”

Like Ryan, Buzicky said she does not think the gender gap in winners is a huge problem, adding that she is glad that people are aware of it. Moving forward, she said the University should reach out to both men and women in nontraditional leadership groups, citing ROTC as a group of potentially strong applicants.

Lane said she aims to further identify and encourage a diverse range of potential candidates to apply.

“The record of Princeton women winning Rhodes Scholarships is disappointing overall,” Keohane said. “But we are optimistic that the kinds of encouragement and support our candidates (including women) received this year will yield more encouraging results before too long.”

Barmeier said he does not think Princeton should try to specifically recruit more female applicants purely to balance gender statistics.

“In sum, I am shocked by the relative disparity between the number of male and female Rhodes scholars from Princeton, but I do not necessarily think it is a ‘bad’ thing,” Barmeier said. “As long as men and women have equal access to information about the scholarship, and equal access to campus resources they would need in the application process, I think Princeton is doing everything it can, or should, do about the gender ratio of scholarship winners.”