Often quoted but seldom cited, French journalist Alphonse Karr once wrote, “The more things change, the more they remain the same.” His perennially valid observation takes on new significance in the context of the lives of women and girls around the globe. In classroom and legislature, in corporate boardroom and non-governmental organization, we talk about globalization: its effects on the economy, on politics, on security, on education. Global connectivity, or at least the ever-increasing awareness of our interconnected relationships, seems to have transformed every aspect of society. Yet if we examine women’s lives and women’s leadership throughout the world, globalization seems in some ways to have rendered little change at all.
Although women’s lives, particularly in industrialized nations, have changed dramatically, women throughout the world face continued inequity--and colleges and universities face the continued and increasingly complex challenge of preparing women for leadership and advocacy. When members of the Women’s College Coalition and guests from women’s colleges around the world met in Washington, DC, this past October, their conversations focused on precisely this challenge. The need to educate women for leadership and advocacy in the complex global world of the twenty-first century is acute. Colleges and universities, and women’s colleges in particular, must take leadership in accomplishing this task.
| Rapid Change, Continued Inequity: Literacy, Economics, and Politics |
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The coalition gathering in Washington formed a diverse international group. Representatives from women’s colleges traveled from many distant places to participate in the conversation: attendees came from as far away as Bangladesh, India, Italy, the United Arab Emirates, and the Philippines. We came together to reflect on the challenges at hand and to discuss the next steps for women’s education.
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Our conversation was guided by the reflections of our three panelists: Linda Basch, president of the National Council of Research on Women; Meredith Reid Sarkees, president of the Global Women’s Leadership in International Security; and Cecilia Conrad, dean of the faculty at Scripps College and president-elect of the International Association for Feminist Economists. |
| Panelists Linda Basch, Cecilia Conrad, and Meredith Reid Sarkees (pictured from left to right) address participants at the 2007 Women's College Coalition Annual Meeting. Photograph by Christine A. Palm. |
Mary Brown Bullock, president emerita of Agnes Scott College, moderated the panel discussion and framed the conversation by encouraging us to see global issues as women’s issues and global challenges at the center of the work of today’s women’s colleges.
The challenges we face are indeed daunting. Linda Basch cited findings from the Council’s 2006 publication Gains and Gaps: A Look at the World’s Women to remind us of specific inequities that continue to affect women--inequities that might be alleviated through women’s education. Violence against women is only one area Basch cited where statistics continue to show deep distress but education “makes a difference.” Around the globe, one in three women will be raped, beaten, coerced into sex, or otherwise abused in her lifetime. Yet research in India finds that educated women, who are more skilled in avoiding and resisting violence, are less likely to experience it.
Despite the importance of education in alleviating this and other problems, too many women remain uneducated. Basch noted that more than 18 percent of the adult population (or 800 million people worldwide) is illiterate--and 64 percent of illiterate adults are women. Literacy rates for girls have improved over the past three decades, from 55 percent in 1970 to 74 percent in 2000. Yet in 2000, girls still represented 57 percent of school-aged children worldwide who were not in school.
As Basch reminded us, “The education of women and girls…[is] a driver of economic growth, productivity, and poverty reduction. Women with some degree of education are found to be more likely to invest in the health, education, and well-being of their families.”
Thus women’s education results in a range of benefits: better nutrition for the whole family, better health care, better health and survival rates for both boys and girls, lower birth rates, poverty reduction, earlier and longer schooling for children, and better overall economic performance. Yet around the globe, women’s education remains inadequate.
Women’s economic empowerment is unsatisfactory, too. Cecilia Conrad noted that wealth differences around the world manifest in various forms, from earnings to land ownership, and that these differences often translate into disadvantages for women.
Even in the United States, men receive a disproportionate share of economic awards: women earn 77 cents to the dollar of what men earn. Conrad described women’s work as an engine of economic growth and development whose products do not always benefit women themselves. “Many [investors and workers] take advantage of new world opportunities [carried] on the backs of women, who face few alternatives for better employment [and] restrictions that limit their opportunities to bargain for higher wages,” said Conrad.
Indeed, about 60 percent of the world’s informal workers (including domestic and childcare providers in the United States) are women, and these women often lack legal protection. According to Conrad, the global feminization of HIV/AIDS applies not just to the infections themselves (women account for nearly half of all cases), but to women’s workloads as well (women and girls provide up to 90 percent of HIV/AIDS care in the home, correlating to a one-third increase in workload).
Women are disadvantaged in terms of economic leadership as well: as Conrad noted, women hold only 2 percent of U.S. CEO positions and 14.7 percent of board seats at Fortune 500 companies. With such meager representation, their ability to effect change within these institutions is limited.
Greater economic access corresponds to greater agency. Isobel Coleman of the Council on Foreign Relations wrote in Foreign Affairs that women who are economically engaged become more involved in family decision-making and “participate more in public affairs and community life” (2004).
But as Meredith Reid Sarkees reminded us, economic engagement alone is not the bridge across the public participation gap. In the United States, for instance, where women’s economic engagement and literacy is relatively high, women’s political participation (at least in terms of elected office) is middling at best. On the national level, women’s participation has increased, but the overall numbers are small.
In 1979 women held only 3 percent of seats in Congress. This figure increased to 10 percent in 1993, but has grown very slowly, peaking at only 16.3 percent in 2007. Today the United States ranks 67th out of 134 countries in terms of women in the legislature; this is a decline from a ranking of 41st in 1997. And the United States has had no female chief of state.
Thus by a multitude of indicators--educational, economic, and political--women have not reached equity, either in the United States or in our sister countries around the globe. The specific inequities are constantly shifting. Alluding to Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat, Cecilia Conrad reminded us that, indeed, the world is not flat. Its distribution of resources has peaks and valleys, and they comprise a constantly shifting landscape.
The nature of global competition has changed and is always changing, creating gaps in newly challenging ways. The knowledge, habits, processes, and skills necessary to compete in the global economy change constantly and at an ever increasing pace. As educators, we must prepare women to traverse this fluid landscape.
| Educating for Leadership: The Need for Political Participation |
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In planning our plenary panel discussion, Carol Ann Mooney, president of Saint Mary’s College, drew inspiration from the work of Amartya Sen, Nobel Laureate in Economics and Lamont University Professor at Harvard University, and Martha Nussbaum, the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago Law School. Sen and Nussbaum have pioneered the capability approach for evaluating human well-being and development. |
| Cecilia Conrad, Meredith Reid Sarkees, and Hoon Eng Khoo (Vice President for Academic Planning, Asian University for Women) meet for discussion following the panel presentation. Photograph by Christine A. Palm. |
Traditional measures of a nation’s economic development status include quantitative indicators such as gross national product per capita.
In contrast, the capability approach takes into account a distribution of indicators, including education and health care, which are central to the potential for full and flourishing human lives. In reflecting on the capability approach, Sen has said, “[E]ducation in general and women's education in particular can, working with other changes, make a critical difference. Indeed, a great many empirical studies…have brought out the crucial role of basic education for all--and of women's education in particular--in facilitating radical social and economic changes that are so badly needed in our problem-ridden world” (2004).
Our conversations reaffirmed the significance of women’s education in changing personal circumstances for individual women throughout the world. But as the meeting participants discussed the evident need for women’s education, we had to ask ourselves: for what are we educating the women who attend our colleges and universities? We have established that education improves the lives of individual women and their families--but education must serve some greater collective goal.
Women must be prepared to lead the way, not only in their private lives but also through public participation. Meredith Reid Sarkees cited several global and local forces described in Gains and Gaps that have combined to thwart women’s and girls’ advancement both globally and in the United States: the predominance of neo-liberal economics, the rise of fundamentalist ideologies and conservative governments, and the intensification of militarism over the past decade.
To these she added a fourth: the failure of political leadership. “In addition to having a culture that sends very mixed messages about suitable roles for women,” said Sarkees, “we have failed to develop a critical mass of political leaders who are seriously committed to promoting women’s rights.” For Sarkees, the compelling imperative of our meeting appeared at the intersection of two questions: “Women’s leadership for what?” and “Women’s leadership for whom?”
Her co-panelists seemed to agree that leadership was at the crux of the challenge facing women’s education in the twenty-first century. They collectively stressed the imperative to educate all women around the globe, and to educate them for leadership by inculcating the kinds of competencies that are essential in today’s world: multicultural fluency, problem-solving skills, and economic literacy, to name only a few.
In attaining these skills, women would prepare themselves for more fulfilling careers and personal lives, as well as for leadership and advocacy on behalf of other women who share in their local and global communities.
If we are to prepare women for leadership, what would that leadership look like? Sarkees gave us a hint. Drawing a parallel between the distinctions that both Amartya Sen and Michael Beschloss (author of Presidential Courage) have made in describing types of leaders, Sarkees spoke of the power of transformational leadership.
While transactional leaders create clear structures in which people are motivated through individual rewards and punishments, transformational leaders follow their vision to fundamentally change the status quo. As Sarkees said, “If we want to have a society in which there is equity for women, then we have to nurture and support transformational leaders who have both a vision of a better world for women and who are willing to take actions and risks to benefit others.”
And where would that leadership be located? Swanee Hunt, Director of the Women and Policy Program at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and former U.S. Ambassador to Austria, wrote in Foreign Affairs, “[W]here women have taken leadership roles, it has been as social reformers and entrepreneurs, not as politicians or government officials….The world, however, needs [women] to take that experience into the political sphere….[Women] come to the table with a different perspective on conflict resolution. Women are more likely to adopt a broad definition of security that includes key social and economic issues that would otherwise be ignored, such as safe food and clean water and protection from gender-based violence” (2007). Their leadership in public affairs would be transformative indeed.
When John Roberts filled the United States Supreme Court seat vacated by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, Anna Quindlen commented: “There is now only a single woman on the Supreme Court. Imagine the world if homes, businesses, schools, had only one woman for every eight men. It would be an odd sort of world, wouldn’t it?” (2006). One might, of course, imagine an inverse corollary: a world where women’s political leadership matched their numbers in society. Colleges and universities, both in the United States and abroad, play a key role in envisioning and creating that world.
| Inventing a New Plan: the Opportunity for Women’s Colleges |
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The challenge to prepare women for leadership extends to all educators of women, in primary through post-secondary schools, in the United States and around the globe. Meredith Reid Sarkees paraphrased Ernest Boyer’s observation that “[E]ducation in its fullest sense is inescapably a moral enterprise. It is not the cultivation of skills or the learning of certain branches of knowledge, but a continuous and conscious effort to guide students to know and pursue what is good and worthwhile.”
But as Sarkees indicated, women’s colleges are uniquely situated to develop a model of women’s activism and transformational leadership that would benefit women and society worldwide. Women’s colleges have always emphasized the importance of women’s agency, the value of women’s equity, and the critical goal of improving women’s status--concerns that will serve us well in the new global century.
The opportunity before us, said Basch, is to channel the force of women’s colleges to redirect globalizing processes. But as she reminded us, women’s colleges can’t do it alone. “We need to work in partnership with other women--with women’s colleges in other countries, with women in the business sector, and with women’s advocacy groups. And we need to find ways to partner with men, and bring them into efforts to shape and implement a transformative agenda for change.”
Basch quoted Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Claudia Kennedy, “Women not only see things differently from men; they see different things.” In seeing different things, they strengthen the organizations they lead and in which they participate. Cecilia Conrad paraphrased Kennedy: “Women’s colleges not only see things differently, but they see different things.”
Conrad urged women’s colleges to act globally, to be advocates for girls’ and women’s education, and to prepare women to be competitors in the global economy. In sum, she envisioned women’s colleges as global advocates for human kind, using the dual lenses of women’s issues and globalization to renew the case for liberal education.
Fulfilling this imperative will indeed be a challenge. Most women’s colleges in the United States were founded at a time when educational opportunities for women were severely limited. As women’s opportunities have expanded, so too has the work of women’s colleges, moving to fill the new gaps created as the landscape of higher education shifts.
As we reinterpret the founding missions of established institutions for the contemporary world, and as new women’s colleges emerge in Bahrain, Bangladesh, Kenya, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, the United Arab Emirates and Zimbabwe, where opportunities for women’s higher education have been severely limited, women’s colleges continue to meet the ever-changing educational needs of increasingly diverse populations of women in the twenty-first century.
Yet as Alphonse Karr said, the more things change, the more they remain the same: the education and advancement of women across all racial, ethnic, age, socioeconomic and religious lines is what Joanne Creighton, president of Mount Holyoke College, has described as the unfinished agenda of the twenty-first century.
The Women’s College Coalition, together with its sister women’s colleges and other advocates around the world, is responding to the clarion call sounded at our annual meeting. We are writing the next chapter in women’s education--expanding the scope of research, information, and knowledge sharing to develop sustainable cross-border contacts and multicultural educational endeavors. With new partnerships and new technologies, we are advancing curriculum development, collaborations, and student, faculty, and staff exchanges. We invite others to join us in turning the page into the next chapter.
For more information about the Women’s College Coalition and its work educating women for leadership and advocacy in the twenty-first century, contact Susan Lennon at susan.lennon@womenscolleges.org
Boyer, E. 1998. College: The undergraduate experience in America. New York: Harper Collins Publishers.
Coleman, I. 2004. The payoff from women’s rights. Foreign Affairs (May/June): 80.
Hunt, S. 2007. Let women rule. Foreign Affairs (May/June): 109.
Quindlen, A. 2006. Remembrance of things past. Newsweek (March 6).
Sen, A. 2004. What’s the point of women’s education? Paper presented at the meeting of Women’s Education Worldwide, Mount Holyoke and Smith Colleges.
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