Report examines gender gap in campus leadership

The 114-page report cites 10 themes of female undergraduate leadership that emerged from an examination of four facets of University life: the first-year experience, academic and faculty issues, social and extracurricular life and alumni perspectives. The report also details recommendations for improving the opportunities for all students to excel.

Among its findings was a trend of female students to gravitate to behind-the-scenes positions in campus extracurriculars, leaving men to hold more prominent or elected offices.

The committee examined student leaders in the “highest-profile” campus leadership positions — USG president, Honor Committee chair, class presidents and the editor-in-chief of The Daily Princetonian — from 1970 to 2010.

Female representation in these leadership roles climbed steadily from the 1970s to the 1990s, then fell by nearly half in the 2000s, from 31.4 percent to 17.1 percent.

Still, over the same period, the number of undergraduate women enrolled in the University increased steadily and approached 50 percent by 2000, “so that the fall-off in women involved in these high-profile posts in the following decade was even more dramatic than these figures show,” the report states.

“Women are interested in many kinds of activities, and it is misleading to assume that only these most visible posts ‘count’ in assessing student leadership,” the committee wrote. “Nonetheless, it is notable that after decades of gradually gaining more visibility in such prominent positions on campus, women were less well represented in the past decade.”

Possible reasons for the disparity, according to survey and focus-group feedback garnered by the committee, include a negative image of traditional campus organizations as “sites for resume-building or paper shuffling” rather than avenues where students can “actually get something done.”

Female students also listed concerns over the personal exposure that a position such as eating club president or the high visibility of a campaign might entail as reasons that deterred them from seeking high-status leadership positions.

Some women who said they had expressed interest in more prominent posts also said that they had been dissuaded from running for elected office because they had “gotten the message from peers that such posts should be held by men.”

“Several alumnae and students told us that they had sought to run for president of an organization and were pressured to run for vice president or social chair instead, on the grounds that these posts are more suitable for women,” the committee reported.

Messages from peers can also affect other aspects of undergraduate women’s experiences, according to the report. Most notably, women, more than men, benefit significantly from mentoring and encouragement to do their best in academic and leadership settings.

“We really heard a lot about mentoring, particularly from alumnae,” Steering Committee chair and Wilson School professor Nannerl Keohane said in an interview. “Women said more often than men, ‘A mentor is very important to me.’ ”

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USG vice president Catherine Ettman ’13, a member of the Steering Committee, said she agreed with the finding and had been “very affected” by the encouragement of friends and former USG executive members in deciding to run for her position on the USG last fall.

“Who knows if I would’ve run if I didn’t have those three pivotal conversations?” she said. “So much of it has not to do with your ability, but your assessment of your ability.”

Similarly, Quadrangle Club president Julia Blount ’12 said in an email that she had initially been certain that she would run for an officer position in the club, but didn’t decide which position she would run for until she received feedback from friends.

“A number of my friends encouraged me to run for president, and after lots of consideration, I took their advice,” she explained.

Even with the high regard of peers and faculty, however, the report describes a phenomenon by which female undergraduates “undersell themselves,” or do not believe they have the skills or experience to seek elected office.

Undergraduate women are therefore less likely than men to see themselves as appropriate for highly visible leadership posts, the committee reported.

In the classroom, men also have a tendency to speak up more quickly than women do, expressing their thoughts even before they are fully formulated, the committee reported. Women, on the other hand, “may take a bit more time to shape their comments.”

“This disparity is of course not found in every seminar or precept,” the report states. “In numerous instances faculty members told us that women speak up confidently in their courses and may even dominate the discussions. But men speak up more quickly in enough settings to make this point worth noting.”

This phenomenon can significantly disadvantage female undergraduates in seminars or precepts where participation constitutes a substantial portion of the final grade.

Whether or not these classroom disparities exist, however, the report found that undergraduate women are outpacing men in academic achievement, except at the very highest levels.

Average cumulative GPA for the combined classes of 2001–2009 showed that women as a group have higher GPAs than men at the University, and that they are more likely to win honors and high honors in almost every field.

Men, however, are more likely to achieve highest honors in all fields — and are also overrepresented at the bottom end of the grade distribution.

These particular findings were unexpected to some. “I am still inspired by my female peers in the classroom and I was surprised to find that they are not achieving as much as men in the classroom,” Ettman said. “I didn’t think my female [peers] were performing at a lower rate than my male peers.”

Keohane said she was surprised that men were achieving highest honors “not only in the physical sciences, where it might be more expected, given numbers of majors and traditions of women’s participation, but also in the humanities, where it was unexpected.”

The report found a significant gender imbalance in the most visible academic prizes and honors at the University.

Data collected since the 1970s on the Rhodes and Marshall scholarships shows that “in each decade the number of men winning these awards has exceeded the number of women by a combined total of 66 to 20 for the Rhodes and 61 to 39 for the Marshall,” the report states.

Furthermore, the University has endorsed more men than women applicants for the Rhodes scholarship in all but one year in the past 10 years, and often by a large margin — 18 men to five women in 2000, for example, and 13 men to nine women in 2010.

“Numbers are too small for reliable generalization, but the skew in numbers favoring men over women in Princeton’s endorsements seems to carry through each step in the Rhodes competition,” the report states.

University honors show a similar trend, with only eight of 41 valedictorians and nine of 39 Latin salutatorians being women from 1970 through 2009.

The report emphasizes, however, that the gender skew in academic honors may be significantly influenced by the disproportionate representation of the physical sciences, engineering and quantitative social science departments, departments in which “women majors are in the minority,” in the pool of candidates eligible for such honors.

The majors from these departments over 2006–2010 were only 33 percent women, according to the report.

Keohane also noted the significance of the report’s finding that the first few weeks as an undergraduate significantly affect the trajectory of female students for the rest of their time at the University.

She was surprised by “the recurrent finding that the first few weeks are very important at Princeton ... maybe more so than at other campuses,” she said. Keohane is the former president of Duke University and Wellesley College.

“Social networks tend not to be very fluid on this campus, and on-ramps to visible leadership posts are in short supply later in one’s years at Princeton,” the report states, emphasizing that, while this finding affects both men and women, it is worth keeping it in mind “in conjunction with our other findings.”

The committee also consistently stresses the significance of two general findings in its report.

First, it notes, there are “subtle but real” differences in how male and female undergraduates approach their college years, and in the ways in which they navigate the University once they arrive.

“For those who may wonder why we need this committee in the first place, that is our answer,” the report states.

The report also stresses that the findings put forth in the report are not Princeton-specific — rather, many of the patterns observed at the University are common to peer institutions.

Committee members would not provide the names of the peer institutions that they surveyed, but comparative data subcommittee chair and associate professor of sociology and public affairs Elizabeth Armstrong GS ’93 said they included “some Ivy Leagues, some liberal arts colleges and some selective research universities.”

Keohane noted that the committee did not have a chance to reach out to public universities or less selective colleges.

The report makes specific recommendations for achieving the broad goals of celebrating both male and female leadership at the University as well as addressing any remaining stereotypes about gendered behavior on campus. Most of these recommendations centered on improving mentoring at the University.

The report prioritizes steps such as a reorganization of orientation to include increased participation by upperclassmen in planning and implementation. The committee also proposed a “Re-Orientation” session after fall break, where freshmen would be involved in the planning and implementation of activities that would build on those from the first orientation.

Keohane noted that this was one of her favorite recommendations because “people would now have a better sense of what questions to ask.”

Much of the background for this particular recommendation, explained Steering Committee member and former Engineers Without Borders co-president Jane Yang ’11, came from a survey of the entire Class of 2014 that asked what the students expected their lives to be like on campus. After fall break, the Class of 2014 was surveyed again with questions about their first weeks at the University.

“We noticed a lot of comments that were like … ‘there’s an overwhelming amount of stuff to handle and do,’ ” Yang said. “So a lot of our recommendations focused on refocusing orientation, so that the message isn’t just, ‘How do you get to this building on campus,’ but also, ‘Here is the reason why you actually belong.’ ”

The report also proposed strengthening campus peer-to-peer advising and a new mentoring program for women in the residential colleges, with undergraduate women being selected to mentor female freshmen and sophomores, building on the current residential college advising program.

Keohane noted that the committee had considered the risk of such a program exacerbating gender differences “by making it seem that women need help and men don’t.” Ultimately, however, the committee became convinced that the step would be beneficial in light of the overwhelming feedback that mentoring was helpful for women undergraduates.

“We just heard it so often,” Keohane explained.

Other recommendations include faculty members’ encouraging talented female students to apply for prestigious fellowships or graduate school and to take leadership in various venues on campus by communicating that the student is “exceptional.”

The report also proposes improving the visibility of leadership training programs on campus and the development of policies designed to invite women to become campus leaders.

While committee members said they were satisfied with their work on the whole, some members said they feel they did not fully “get to the bottom” of a lot of observed patterns at the University, Armstrong said.

“That may be in part because some of the drivers of what we observed on the committee are reflections of much broader social patterns and cultures and norms that extend far beyond the University,” she said. “There were features of the Princeton University environment and undergraduate life that maybe exacerbated some social patterns and ameliorated others ... but clearly what’s going on at Princeton is not unrelated to what’s going on in the broader society.”

Keohane noted that the committee members also encountered difficulties in agreeing on the definition of “leadership.”

Formally, the committee has defined leadership as the ability of students to “determine or clarify goals for a group of individuals and bring together the energies of members of that group to accomplish those goals,” according to the Steering Committee’s website.

The committee was established by President Shirley Tilghman in December 2009 and included nine faculty members, three staff members and six undergraduates.

Much of the committee’s research was conducted through data collection from the ‘Prince’ and records of student leadership, as well as consultations with the student body, alumni, faculty and staff through workshops and survey questions posted on the University home page.

The committee also established focus groups spanning a broad range of backgrounds.

Residential college staff selected students for these focus groups who, the staff felt, could be representative of the average student at the University, according to social and extracurricular life committee chair and Associate Dean of Undergraduate Students Thomas Dunne.