As we laid out our two-part OCWW series on women faculty (previous issue) and women academic deans (current issue), we sought to highlight the inextricable links between the two. Who is in the faculty and how they advance determine the next generation of deans in our colleges and universities. For academic deans, the caliber and diversity of the faculty, in turn, influences the quality of the educational curriculum and co-curriculum such leaders can co-create with their faculty.

Troubling Trends for Women Faculty

The faculty issue revealed strong progress for women in many areas over the past three decades, which we need to celebrate. But it also uncovered troubling issues that will affect the pathway to becoming an academic dean. To detect such trends, collecting data regularly, and disaggregated by gender and race at a minimum, is critical. For example, we learned from Duke University’s study that if institutions are not watching carefully, previous forward motion might flatline. To everyone’s surprise, Duke’s survey showed that the institution had not increased the percentage of women assistant professors over a ten year period. 

We learned as well that even though some STEM fields have achieved rough parity among faculty, as in biology, other, like engineering and physics, continue to have dramatic gender imbalances. We know, too, that women of color overall have not achieved parity in faculty hiring. Moreover, for women from every discipline who choose to have or adopt children, becoming a mother continues, even in 2006, to be a liability to a woman’s career even as it continues to be an asset to a man’s.

The Missing Data on Academic Deans

If we can report trends for women faculty across disciplines, we unfortunately cannot do the same for academic deans. While AAUP, the National Center for Education Statistics at the Department of Education, and the National Science Foundation have taken the lead in collecting invaluable data that allows us to compare across gender and race who is hired as faculty, it has proven a challenge to collect data about who is hired as academic deans. Consequently, it is very difficult to determine progress or backsliding or make more nuanced assessments of the impact and experience of women academic deans.

We therefore make a public plea and ask key national educational data collection agencies to begin to gather disaggregated data about academic administrators. We also encourage national associations like American Council of Academic Deans (ACAD) to at least poll their members across race and gender to begin to create a better portrait of who becomes dean. We also invite young scholars to begin to do research in this area. Vernese Edgehill has done for this issue as she seeks to pinpoint the numbers of black women in dean positions at Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

The American Council on Education (ACE) Office of Women in Higher Education set the bar for such work with their decades’ long tracking of women presidents. We need something similar for academic administrative positions as well. On Campus with Women will be happy to partner with interested parties to feature research findings in future OCWW issues. Next year we will be issuing an AAC&U Status Report on Women in Higher Education, the first such overview provided by any higher education association for over a decade. We welcome new research to inform that study.

Hopeful Signs for Women Deans

Without firm data to support assertions, I offer the anecdotal evidence that there are some signs that give us hope. We do know, for instance, that the number of women presidents has steadily increased over the years from its woeful 3 percent in 1970 to 21 percent in 2001. The typical path to a presidency has been through a deanship or serving as chief academic officer. A recent Chronicle of Higher Education reports that 32.1 percent of new presidents continue to come to the presidency directly from either a provost’s position or that of a chief academic officer. 

Since there has been a steady increase in the number of women presidents, one can suppose that there has been an increase of some proportion in women academic deans over the decades. Similarly, since women faculty now number 41 percent of the full-time faculty, there continues to be a larger pool for academic deans. We know, however, that numbers alone do not determine one’s advancement. Being championed by an influential person matters significantly as does having leadership credentials, some of which women themselves have had to create in a world that stone-walled women’s advancement. Two notable organizations include: Higher Education Resource Services (HERS) and ACE’s Office of Women in Higher Education.

Virginia Coombs’ article in this OCWW issue suggests that when some women attain deanships or provosts positions, they also are more open--or insistent--about achieving greater gender equity across the multiple deans’ positions on a given campus. As in all hires, both faculty and deans alike, networking is key to developing a strong pool of candidates. The more diversified the leadership, the more diversified the pool for potential leaders. Coombs also reminds us that mentoring promising women leaders is an effective way to expand women’s academic leadership.

It Can Be Lonely at the Top—but Also Rewarding

Because academia is a very hierarchical system, as women advance, they can discover that their advancement cuts them off from women’s networks and racial networks which they have come to rely up to sustain them and give them courage. In a number of previous OCWW issues, including this one, we inevitably have articles by women who are “firsts” and “onlys” as they assume new positions higher up on the pyramid. It can be a disorienting experience, a kind of haunting echo of an earlier period in a person’s career that they thought was a barrier overcome--and done with.

In Sue Rosser’s case, however, the very rationale for hiring her as the first academic dean at Georgia Institute of Technology was influenced by her distinguished national and international reputation as an academic feminist whose scholarship, teaching, and administration had been devoted to gender equity in general and gender equity in the sciences in particular. The institution specifically sought out a dean who knew how to turn gender equity into an educational asset.

There is hope, then, that there are enlightened institutions where a woman can bring her full self  and deepest commitments openly to her academic leadership roles. If the anecdotal evidence is eventually backed up by data collected in the future, we have cause for hope that higher education will have the academic leadership it needs to prepare students for the diverse, complex, and often deeply divided world they will live in and shape.