By SUSAN JONES
As Joan Gabel becomes Pitt’s 19th chancellor on July 17, the University joins at least 10 institutions — including Columbia, Dartmouth, Penn State and New York University — that have named their first female presidents in the past year.
With Gabel's arrival, all of Pennsylvania's state-related universities will be led by women. Penn State named Neeli Bendapudi president in 2022; JoAnne Epps became Temple's acting president in July; and Lincoln President Brenda Allen has served since 2017.
A report from the Eos Foundation’s Women’s Power Gap initiative, which seeks to increase the number of women leaders from diverse backgrounds across all sectors of the economy, found that between September 2021 and May 2023, the percentage of women at the helm of 146 leading research universities (R1s) increased from 22 to 30 percent.
But nearly 40 percent (57 schools) have never had a woman president, including Carnegie Mellon and West Virginia universities, and fewer than 30 percent of board chairs are women. Pitt’s first female Board of Trustees chair, Eva Tansky Blum, served from 2015 to 2020, and was chair of the search committee that brought Gabel to campus.
Six of the eight Ivy League schools — Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard and Penn — are led by women.
Of the 15 ACC schools, only three have female presidents — Pitt, Louisville and Wake Forest. Nine of the 38 AAU public schools are led by women, along with one interim and two schools that had female presidents until this spring.
Both top leaders of the Association of American Universities are women. President Barbara R. Snyder served as president of Case Western Reserve University from 2007 to 2020. Carol Folt, chair of the AAU Board of Directors, is president of the University of Southern California. (Pitt Chancellor Patrick Gallagher is the immediate past chair of the board.)
In addition, Monica Bertagnolli, who was the first female director of the National Cancer Institute, was nominated in May by President Biden to lead the National Institutes of Health, a major funder of university research. If confirmed, she would be the second woman to hold the position.
The Women’s Power Gap report concluded that “For decades, the primary approach to increasing organizational diversity has been to train women, people of color, and other underrepresented groups to fit into existing institutional cultures. True diversity comes by creating inclusive environments where all can flourish.”
Among its suggestions to improve diversity on all fronts, the group said:
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Governing boards, in collaboration with presidents, should make bold, long-term public commitments to reaching equitable representation in top leadership and require each college, graduate school, and academic center within the university to do the same. They should create annual benchmarks to achieve those goals and review progress at each board meeting.
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Managers must go the extra mile to consider structural obstacles that stand in the way of equitable outcomes. If boards and hiring managers focus only on creating diverse finalist pools, they may not be taking necessary steps to remove selection bias from the final decision.
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Chief human resources officers or others should be tasked with calling out subjective considerations in search committees and pushing for more objective measures
On campus representation
In comparison, women made up 49 percent of full-time, non-School of Medicine faculty at Pitt in 2021-22, the highest proportion among all public schools in the American Association of University Professors, according to a gender equity report presented in the spring to Pitt’s Senate Budget Policies committee.
The breakdown of female faculty by rank at Pitt and the percentage change since 2015-16:
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33 percent of full professors (up 7 percent)
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47 percent of associate professors (up 4.1 percent)
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55 percent of assistant professors (up 3.6 percent)
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60 percent of instructors and lecturers (up 1.6 percent since 2015-16, but down nearly 10 percent since 1998-99)
For staff, the percentage of women is even higher. In fall 2021, 61 percent of full and part-time staff were women. This number has remained relatively the same since 2012.
The Women’s Power Gap report said that women students have outnumbered men on college campuses since the early 1980s, and today earn 58 percent of undergraduate degrees, 62 percent of master’s degrees, and more than half of Ph.D.s.
At Pitt, the percentage of female students has been rising steadily over the past 10 years. In fall 2021, 54.8 percent of undergraduates were women and 56.1 percent of all students. Those numbers are up from around 50 percent in fall 2012.
Find diversity dashboards on the Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion website.
Susan Jones is editor of the University Times. Reach her at suejones@pitt.edu or 724-244-4042.
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