What's Happening to Our Girls?

Princeton University President Shirley Tilghman recently shared a shocking problem her university faces: despite a 50-50 ratio of undergraduate men and women, there are enormous disparities between men and women in visible positions of student leadership on campus.

President Tilghman was the keynote speaker at the centennial conference of the Head Mistresses Association of the East—an organization of over 100 heads of both single-sex and coed schools who are committed to the education of girls—that I attended last month. (Former Nightingale trustee and past parent Anna Quindlen and current trustee and Barnard President Debora Spar were also among the distinguished speakers.)

She went on to say that undergraduate women were winning fewer prestigious academic awards and postgraduate fellowships. With the 40th anniversary of coeducation at Princeton looming, Tilghman was determined to get to the root of the problem. Thus, she convened a steering committee chaired by Nan Keohane, the former president of Duke (who had also researched the performance and attitudes of female students at Duke), to study the issue and make recommendations for change. If you are interested, the complete committee report is available at http://www.princeton.edu/reports/2011/leadership/

Although the percentage of women in high-profile student leadership positions on Princeton's campus had been rising throughout the 70s, 80s, and 90s, the number began to decline from 2000 onward; the same was true for prize-winners. (She did note with pride that in 1975, both the Princeton valedictorian and salutatorian were women—I am proud to report that those two women were graduates of Nightingale!) In its research, the committee discovered that "although some [undergraduate] women do run for elected office, many choose less visible jobs behind the scenes," and, shockingly in 2011, some reported that they got "the message from peers that such posts are more appropriately sought by men." Women were more often the secretaries of their class or of high-profile clubs, and according to both men and women, the essential tasks needed to keep the groups running fell more often to women. Further, women consistently "undersell themselves," a tendency that one alumna described as "the intensity of self-effacement." It sounded to me like an age-old problem: women do most of the work and take little of the credit. (It’s ironic that this undergraduate problem persists at a university where the president and most of her leadership team are women.)

What's going on? It's important to note that this problem is not confined to Princeton; President Tilghman is just one of the few presidents honest enough to speak about it. In fact, at Duke University, President Keohane found in 2002 that, for undergraduates, "being cute trumps being smart for women in the social environment," and that women suffered from what was termed "effortless perfectionism": be beautiful, smart, and athletic, and make it all look like it took no effort! As I noted in a 2003 Nighthawk article about President Keohane's findings, female undergraduates spoke openly of the pressure to look good and the expectation that they "hide their intelligence in order to succeed with their male peers." Perhaps most telling was that "graduates of the former Woman's College at Duke University, which merged with the men's college in 1972, reported more personal confidence than their younger peers." Duke women felt better about themselves when the all-women's experience was the norm! To me this was another powerful argument for single-sex education.

What did Princeton's steering committee recommend? First, restructuring orientation to include more upper-class students with the goal of building more immediate connections for the first-years. Secondly, and most importantly, the committee proposed to strengthen both faculty and peer mentoring programs to encourage more women; those who were successful in winning Fulbright or Rhodes scholarships, for example, reported the importance of a faculty member encouraging them towards a goal that they would not have set by themselves.

If I had been on the task force, I would have also recommended that Princeton establish all-women's dorms where older students can naturally mentor younger ones. The importance of a "room of one's own," as Virginia Woolf called it at the beginning of the 20th century, is still necessary to combat gender stereotypes.

All of this reminds me how important a school like Nightingale is. Our single-sex environment allows girls to develop into confident and bold young women. Faculty and staff encourage our girls to undertake scientific research, to apply for prestigious awards, and to stretch themselves both academically and otherwise. The personalized support we provide ensures that our girls are ready and eager to tackle the world ahead of them. As our mission statement says: our commitment to the success of every girl is absolute.

So while President Tilghman’s findings are difficult to hear in 2011, I look around every day at the schoolhouse and see young women with uncommon drive, confidence, and knowledge. They know what we all know: Nightingale girls don’t just lead the show, they are the show.

—Dorothy A. Hutcheson, Head of School