Percentage of women presidents in state surpasses national average; greatest gains among women of color
BOSTON, May 31, 2023 /PRNewswire/ — A report released today by the Women’s Power Gap (WPG) shows a significant increase in both women and people of color at the highest levels of leadership at colleges and universities in Massachusetts since 2018—the result of a sustained public push to better diversify the uppermost ranks of the state’s academic institutions.
- 39 percent of all college presidents are now women, up six percentage points in the past five years. This puts Massachusetts above the national average of 33 percent women at the helm of colleges and universities.
- The number of presidents who are women of color more than doubled, from 6 to 16.5 percent, in the same period.
- Women have reached parity among provosts in the state, with 51 percent women in that role, compared to 47 percent five years ago.
- Among board chairs, the number of women rose from 27 to 42 percent.
“There is certainly much to celebrate, but we need to keep pressing ahead,” said WPG president Andrea Silbert. “Since women are half of provosts, the steppingstone to the presidency, they also should be half of all presidents, but they remain under 40 percent. We still have 26 institutions in the state that have never had a woman in the top slot and, since we’ve been tracking data, there hasn’t been one Latina president.”
Today’s WPG report comes amid increased awareness of the importance of ensuring that top academic leadership in the state better represents the student population it serves. Women have outnumbered men on college campuses since the early 1980s, and today earn 58% of undergraduate degrees; 62% of master’s degrees: and more than half of PhDs.
Lee Pelton, president of the Boston Foundation who served as president of Emerson College from 2011 to 2021 said, “The work of the Women’s Power Gap has helped to raise awareness of the need for diversity in our state’s institutions of higher education, which has no doubt prompted the changes we’re starting to see. I’m proud to have been part of this effort and look forward to seeing even more progress in the months and years ahead.”
The WPG published its first report on higher education leadHership in 2018, and subsequent reports have shown slow but steady progress since then. In that time, the WPG has held two major summits, as well as one-on-one meetings, with college presidents, and has engaged in ongoing outreach to thought leaders and policymakers throughout the state.
About the Women’s Power Gap: The goal of the Women’s Power Gap (WPG) is to dramatically increase the number of women from diverse backgrounds among chief executive officers and C-suite leaders across all sectors of our economy. We collect and analyze publicly available data and rank companies and institutions on the proportion of their women executives, with a particular focus on women of color. Our reports highlight the barriers to gender and racial equity and promote systemic practices and policies to dismantle them and remove obstacles that all underrepresented groups face. The Women’s Power Gap is an initiative of the Eos Foundation.
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