by Josh Franklin
The gendered imbalance of campus leaders has been the topic of several articles in the Daily Princetonian and posts here on Equal Writes. Various statistics have been presented—most eating club officers are men, but the majority of student groups have female leaders. And all of the candidates for student government seem to be white men. When I started hearing about this, I thought about the activities that I’m involved in. It struck me that in activities that I’m involved in, there’s a pretty even mix of male and female leaders. While I’m not one to dispute the accuracy of statistics on the basis of vague anecdotal evidence, I do want to suggest that we can learn more about this issue on campus if we see beyond the numbers and really consider the experiences of men and women with respect to leadership.
One of the student activities I participate in is Outdoor Action. Many of the student leaders of the program (the leader trainers, who lead the leaders who lead the freshmen orientation trips) are women, and it seems to me that they are accorded as much respect as male leaders. I cannot claim that women are given objectively equal opportunities here; I have neither the statistics nor the female experience that could speak to the pressures and challenges of being a woman and a leader. Nevertheless, it seems that the Outdoor Action program is doing some things right. As criticized in the Tory, OA actively encourages co-leadership that challenges gender stereotypes. In practice, this might only mean that female leaders are assigned some ‘strength tasks’ (like leading while hiking), while male leaders are assigned tasks like cooking and leading emotionally reflective discussions. I think that this reflects—and, to some degree, promotes—an environment where it’s harder to relegate women to a secondary role. Or to put it another way, I think a little bit of awareness and conscientiousness can go a long way towards creating opportunities for positive gender interactions.
I suppose that in the end, I don’t have any major claims about women as leaders on campus. Mostly, I don’t want to speak for women’s experiences—it seems clear that women face certain challenges as leaders on campus, and as a man I cannot claim that a particular space is free of gender discrimination. Rather, what I want to do is suggest an approach for thinking about gender and leadership on campus, which I hope will be taken up at some point by women who can share their real experiences in this regard. Namely, I think that by focusing on statistics, we set up the search for a vaguely defined structural gender bias. This isn’t terribly productive, because broad statistics like the ones presented in the Daily Princetonian merely suggest that there is some discrimination against women seeking positions of leadership—without indicating anything specific about that discrimination. But we knew that already; is there any doubt that in many spaces on campus, women are viewed as less competent than men?
While it might be interesting to know more about different specific groups and activities, to pick apart this discrimination with statistics, I think that it’s probably much more important and productive to think about spaces where women are empowered in leadership roles and about what those groups are doing right. Clearly, not everyone accepts that women face discrimination on campus. But that doesn’t mean that demonstrating that that oppression exists should be our only objective. So what do you think? What’s being done right in terms of women’s leadership?
