The appointments of female presidents at several high-profile universities in recent years had women talking at the Fourth Women Presidents' Summit in Washington last month.
Sure they were happy to see Mary Sue Coleman appointed as president of the University of Michigan system. And they noted that women now head three of the seven Ivy League universities: Ruth J. Simmons at Brown University, Judith Rodin at the University of Pennsylvania, and Shirley M. Tilghman at Princeton University. But what many wanted to know was, When those women step down, will any of their successors be women?
The odds are against it, Claire Van Ummersen told the assembled leaders. "Boards are still mainly men," said Ms. Van Ummersen, vice president and director of the American Council on Education, which sponsored the summit. "They have this thing in their heads: 'We had our woman president. We've done it. It's somebody else's turn now. We can rest for a while.'"
Her message to governing boards: "It's OK" for a woman to succeed a woman in a presidency. But, she reminded the female executives, "if you look around, it doesn't happen very often."
That's partly because women continue to be a distinct minority in the college-president pool.
According to the council's 2000 survey of college presidents, the most recent statistics available, only 453, or 19 percent, of the 2,341 college and university presidents in the survey were women while 1,888, or 81 percent, were men. Of the total number of women presidents, 13 percent were at doctoral universities; 19 percent at master's institutions; 20 percent at two-year institutions; and 14.8 percent at specialized institutions. About 20 percent of presidents at public institutions were women, as were 18 percent at private colleges.
Many members of the governing boards that hire college and university presidents continue to "wonder if women can make the hard decisions," says Nancy H. Hensel, president of the University of Maine at Presque Isle. "The perception is that we can't. We are viewed as people who do the caregiving and nurturing. If you do that, how can you terminate somebody or cut a budget?"
Despite such lingering sentiments, women are increasingly making their way into the campus executive suite. According to the council's survey, the proportion of women holding the president's job doubled from 9.5 percent in 1986 to 19 percent in 1998.
Women at the summit here talked about the difficulties they face balancing the demands of a presidency with the pressures of family life. While 90 percent of male presidents are married, only 57 percent of female presidents are, according to ACE's survey. The association does not track the number of women presidents who have children, but the ones who attended the ACE conference who do, like Ms. Hensel, say they must make sacrifices that many male presidents don't have to make.
A single parent, Ms. Hensel delayed her pursuit of an administrative career in higher education and stayed in her job as chairwoman of the education department at the University of Redlands until her son graduated from high school in 1991. In the fall of that year, she took a job as dean of education at the University of Maine at Farmington before taking the helm at the University of Maine at Presque Isle in 1999.
Ms. Hensel says she doesn't need a spouse to do her job, but there is the perception that presidents do "because you do a lot of entertaining, and it's more difficult when you don't have someone to help you."
When she was preparing for her first big event as president on campus, she recalls that her administrative assistant asked her, "Who's going to do the flowers?" (Ultimately, an alumna did.) "The president's wife had always done that before," Ms. Hensel said. "It brought to the forefront the differences when you have a president who doesn't have a wife who does those things presidential spouses do." So when everyone kept telling her that the former president's wife had always decorated such a beautiful Christmas tree on campus, Ms. Hensel invited fifth graders from a local elementary school to decorate the campus tree and one in her home, as they have done every year since. "I just didn't have the time," she says.
And time can prevent potential female presidents from taking the top spot in the first place. "It's a hard job," says Theodora J. Kalikow, president of the University of Maine at Farmington. "Some people don't want to do it. It's hard to find that balance between your professional life and your personal life."
But Ms. Kalikow, who's raising a 16-year-old daughter with her partner, who works in the admissions office on campus, strikes that balance. "One of the things I've always done in my professional life is to set a good example and go the hell home when it's time to go home. I don't work 57-hour weeks."
"Academia is still a man's profession," says Tonya Buttry, president of Southeast Missouri Hospital College of Nursing and Health Sciences. She says it takes a "very supportive and understanding" husband -- hers is a computer systems administrator off of the campus -- for her to do her job and raise three children, ages 12, 14, and 18. "I'm a wife first, a mother second, and a president third," she says. "It's my personal belief that I don't intend to change."
Shirley Ann Jackson, president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, whose husband retired as a physicist at Lucent Technologies so his wife could pursue the presidency (he now teaches at Rensselaer), is optimistic that more women presidents will enter the pipeline. But, she notes, that will require "more courageous leadership" from boards of trustees. When a major institution in each sector hires a woman as president, "it creates the belief that women can do it," says Ms. Jackson. "If they can run that institution, they can run many institutions."
