University encourages women to seek high honors

When Kyle Edwards ’12 received an email last spring informing her of fellowship opportunities, she disregarded it.

Though she said only students with a specific grade point average or higher are on the fellowship listserv, she rationalized her decision to ignore the email by telling herself that applying to prestigious awards like the Marshall and Rhodes Scholarships takes a lot of effort with only a small chance of return.

But later on, she received an email personally addressed to her from Office of International Programs Director of Fellowship Advising Deirdre Moloney encouraging her to consider applying.

“I definitely would not have applied if it weren’t for that effort on Dr. Moloney’s part,” Edwards said. “That second round really convinced me to end up applying.”

Last week, the University announced that Edwards had won a Marshall Scholarship.

Stories like Edwards’ have been part of the reason the University has been much more active in encouraging undecided students to apply for Rhodes and Marshall Scholarships this year, with the explicit aim of balancing the gender ratio of those who apply, receive University endorsements and ultimately win. But the intentional broadening of the applicant pool raises questions about fairness to those who took the initiative to apply on their own.

The University’s extra effort certainly paid off this year. No Princeton woman had won the Rhodes Scholarship since 2003, but this year three of Princeton’s four winners are women. Four of Princeton’s five 2011 Marshall winners are women, though many women have won Marshalls in recent years. According to the report of the Steering Committee on Women’s Undergraduate Leadership, since the 1970s, male winners have outnumbered female winners by 66 to 20 for the Rhodes and 61 to 39 for the Marshall.

Rhodes House Warden Donald Markwell alerted President Shirley Tilghman to the lack of female winners at Princeton, according to Wilson School professor Nannerl Koehane. This was a large factor in Tilghman’s decision to create the Steering Committee. Keohane chaired the Steering Committee, served on this year’s mock interview and screening committees for the fellowships and was herself a Marshall scholar.

For the Rhodes in particular, Princeton endorsed more men than women in every year between 2000-10 except 2001. In 2000, 18 men and just five women were endorsed, and in 2010 the ratio was 13 to nine. According to Moloney, this year half the candidates Princeton endorsed for both the Rhodes and the Marshall were women.

“Faculty and other campus mentors ... were also aware of this lack of representation (as publicized by the report) and encouraged many outstanding women to apply,” Moloney said in an email. “This outcome was in many ways an outgrowth of the Steering Committee ... because it was clear that this was a priority at Princeton.”

The faculty, staff and students interviewed mostly agreed that the reasons for the historical disparity are twofold. On the one hand, the gender imbalance is self-perpetuating; if women don’t see other women winning, on some level they don’t see it as a possibility for them. This trend is compounded by women’s relative reluctance to apply or run for high-visibility honors when compared to men.

Marshall winner Christina Chang ’12 said that she benefited from Dr. Moloney’s support and the University’s attempts to “break down traditional socioeconomic barriers,” noting that the fact that Princeton women are perennially underrepresented could have a very real effect on the decision to apply.

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“As with many similar situations, people often think, ‘I don’t look exactly like the person that usually wins these sort of things,’ ” Chang said. “A lot of it is just psychological and it has to do with historical precedent.”

In the press releases announcing both scholarships, the University featured the number of female winners very prominently. Politics professor and faculty fellowship adviser Melissa Lane — the chair of Princeton’s Marshall endorsement meeting, and herself a Marshall scholar — said the University was right to emphasize the disproportionate results due to the historical trend.

“A lot of that streak was just bad luck, but the damage that it can do is that it discourages women from putting their names forward, because if they don’t see women winning year after year, then they don’t think that it’s something women can win,” Lane said.

In addition to the lack of “role models” — which Moloney listed as an important factor for people making the decision to apply — many agreed that women often simply need more encouragement.

“Society generally and also perhaps Princeton does encourage different kinds of behavior from men and women,” Rhodes winner Liz Butterworth ’12 said. “There are cases in which women are less confident or less willing to put themselves forward strongly as a candidate even when they’re extremely qualified.”

The Steering Committee’s report emphasized this point, noting that women might need more mentoring than men in order to take the risk of putting themselves forward for high-visibility recognition.

“In the past, I have found that young men are much more likely to say ‘I’ll give it a shot, what do I have to lose?’ ” Keohane said. “It’s very unlikely that a woman will think that. A woman is much more likely to say, ‘I don’t think of myself as Rhodes scholar material.’ ”

Psychology department chair Deborah Prentice, who does research on gender psychology, noted that there is significant empirical evidence supporting this claim. Prentice noted, however, that these findings wouldn’t necessarily justify an effort to specifically target women.

“The implications of the research aren’t so much that you should encourage just women to apply, but that you encourage all the qualified candidate, both men and women, to apply and that will level out the playing field,” Prentice said.

Prentice — who was not involved with the Steering Committee — said that following the report’s publication, faculty were asked to encourage all eligible students, not just women, to apply. Faculty and staff interviewed for this article were careful to emphasize that all students received more encouragement — particularly from Moloney — to apply for these scholarships.

The goal of this broader encouragement was to balance the applicant pool in terms of gender, since the Steering Committee’s findings suggest that women would benefit more than men from this extra push. However, they denied that women in particular were encouraged more so than men. Rather, everyone was encouraged, with the hope that the encouragement would persuade more women to apply.

“Professors ought to also encourage strong men, but they don’t seem to need it as much,” Keohane said. “It’s not as though we want to discourage men. That’s very important. It’s about bringing things into balance, and they have not been balanced in the past.”

Alan Ryan, a politics professor, former head of New College at Oxford and faculty fellow adviser, said that though the presence of initially reluctant students reduces the numerical likelihood of the acceptance of students who independently decided to apply, this addition was not unfair since all candidates were treated equally once they applied. Lane added that the information meetings are advertised openly to those eligible, and the encouragement is only for people who wouldn’t think of applying on their own.

“What we want to do is get people into the process,” Lane said. “Once they’re in the process, then everyone is treated equally. The role that the encouragement plays is [to] get people to put their names in the ring.”

Marshall winner Emily Rutherford ’12 was aware of the gender imbalances when she applied, and that was part of the appeal for her. She applied primarily because she wanted to go to graduate school in the United Kingdom and needed a way to fund it, but she said that the prospect of being an “agent of change” was appealing.

“My first impression of the Rhodes and the Marshall is that they were looking for people who have these stereotypically masculine traits,” Rutherford said. “I’m very proud to be able to represent a different image of what a Marshall scholar is.”