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Female Participation in College Sports Reaches All-Time High
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Report: 2012 Women in Intercollegiate Sport 1977 to 2012 |
January 22, 2012 Forty years after the passage of federal legislation used to prevent gender discrimination in college sports, female participation opportunities have reached a record high. Nearly 200,000 female athletes will suit up this year on 9,274 NCAA teams. That's an average of 8.7 women's teams per college¬—the highest number ever, according to a report to be released on Monday. Although some sports have seen a decline in participation—including ones with high numbers of minority athletes—the overall numbers have grown markedly during the past two years. That is remarkable, considering the budget constraints many institutions have faced, say the report's authors, R. Vivian Acosta and Linda Jean Carpenter, professors emerita of Brooklyn College. They've been studying women's sports since the enactment of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. |
I Was Impossible, but Then I Saw How to Lead
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Ruth Simmons, former president of Smith College
This interview with Ruth J. Simmons, president of Brown University for the last 11 years, was conducted and condensed by Adam Bryant. Dr. Simmons is stepping down at the end of this academic year and will continue as a professor of comparative literature and Africana studies. Q. Do you remember the first time you were somebody’s boss? A. Probably the first time I was a boss was when I was associate dean of the graduate school at the University of Southern California. I was in my early 30s. Q. Was that an easy transition? A. It was. If I had to ask myself why, I would say it’s because I’d probably been building to the point where I was capable of doing those things without actually knowing that I could. And if you ask me how far back that went — this assemblage of skills and experience — I’d probably say that it went back to my childhood. Q. How so? A. I realized that I was an inveterate organizer from the earliest age. I’m the youngest of 12 children. And although I was the youngest, I tried to organize things in my family. When there were disputes, I tried to mediate. And I intervened in school as well to tell teachers what they were doing wrong, or at least to tell them what I didn’t like about what they were doing. I intervened sometimes in classes to take a leadership role. By the time I got to college, I was impossible. |
More proof that mentors matter
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Ruth Simmons, former president of Smith College
"That was defining for me, the notion that women didn't have to play restricted roles." The libraries at Brown University contain some 6 million items—not just books but also Babylonian clay tablets and locks of Abraham Lincoln's hair. It's striking, then, that the woman in charge of this university came from a home where paper, pencils, and books were as hard to come by as a first edition of the Canterbury Tales. Growing up on a farm in East Texas, the youngest of 12 children, Ruth Simmons could easily recount the story of her life as one of deprivation and hardship. Her father was a sharecropper and her mother was a part-time maid. Yet she's more apt to remember it fondly. "My journey has not been all that arduous, contrary to the way that my life is often presented," she says. "I had this wonderful grounding by my parents, and then an extraordinary streak of luck." Those attributes took her from the farm to a series of important firsts: the first black president of a Seven Sisters school, the first African-American at the helm of an Ivy League institution, and the first female president of Brown. For all this, she credits a series of mentors who challenged, prodded, and supported her along the way. |
2011 Nobel Peace Prize Awarded to Three Activist Women
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Photos by - Left: Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times; center: Jane Hahn for The New York Times; right: Yahya Arhab/EPA |
“We cannot achieve democracy and lasting peace in the world unless women obtain the same opportunities as men to influence developments at all levels of society.” (Citation, 2011 Nobel Peace Prize) October 11, 2011 LONDON — The Nobel Peace Prize for 2011 was awarded on Friday to three campaigning women from Africa and the Arab world in acknowledgment of their nonviolent role in promoting peace, democracy and gender equality. The winners were Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf — Africa’s first elected female president — her compatriot, peace activist Leymah Gbowee and Tawakul Karman of Yemen, a pro-democracy campaigner. They were the first women to win the prize since Kenya’s Wangari Maathai, who died last month, was named as the laureate in 2004. Most of the recipients in the award’s 110-year history have been men and Friday’s decision seemed designed to give impetus to the cause for women’s rights around the world. |
For Women on Campuses, Access Doesn't Equal Success
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October, 2 2011 The influence of gender is lurking on our campuses—in classrooms, in residence halls, on the bleachers at athletic events. It follows students as they study abroad, and it is the elephant in the room when students are learning to lead. The gender-laden experiences of our students have unanticipated consequences in their own lives and in society as a whole, yet those of us in higher education generally behave as if we live in a "postgender" world. |