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Women Rising: The Science of Leadership

Women with science backgrounds are beginning to take more leadership positions in academia than ever before. These pioneers offer their tips for success.

Published April 1, 2003

By Rosemarie Foster
Academy Contributor

A view from Columbus, Ohio, home to The Ohio State University. Image courtesy of espiegle via stock.adobe.com.

Princeton. Rensselaer. Ohio State. What do they have in common? In addition to being among the nation’s most respected universities, they are all led by women with a common background: science.

As college presidents, women from science are in the minority. Of the 2,594 college and university presidents profiled by the American Council on Education (ACE) in their 2002 report The American College President, just 21 percent of them are women. But that’s also good news: that number has more than doubled since 1986, when 9.5 percent of presidents were women.

Moreover, very few college presidents have their highest awarded degree in the sciences. Just 3.2 percent have an advanced degree in the physical/natural sciences, while 2.1 percent have their highest degree in biological sciences. Those numbers pale in comparison to the 44 percent of college presidents whose highest degree is in education.

So what makes these women different, and what drives them? We asked three of them: Shirley Ann Jackson, president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, who assumed her post in July 1999; Shirley M. Tilghman, who became president of Princeton University in June 2001; and Karen A. Holbrook, who took the helm of The Ohio State University in July 2002.

To be sure, all three women have strong backgrounds in education, having spent many years teaching students both in the laboratory as well as the classroom and assuming major university faculty positions. But all began their careers in one place: the laboratory. And that’s where they believe they acquired some of the most important traits that now make them excellent university presidents.

Shirley Ann Jackson

Shirley Ann Jackson

For Shirley Ann Jackson, a theoretical physicist from Washington, D.C., her career path began at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in physics in 1968. In 1973 she became one of the first two African-American women in the U.S. to earn a doctorate in physics, and the first African-American to receive a doctorate from M.I.T. in any subject. Over the course of the next two decades, she conducted research in theoretical, solid state, quantum, and optical physics at AT&T Bell Laboratories in New Jersey.

She became a professor of physics at Rutgers University, where she taught from 1991 to 1995 while continuing to conduct her research. In 1995, President Clinton appointed her chair of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission – a post she held until 1999. Even in her early days in the lab, did she have her eye on such significant leadership?

“I’ve always been interested in science, technology, and public policy,” she explains. “I think there’s a natural evolution as one goes from doing research oneself, particularly as a theoretical physicist, to building a research group, having others work with one on one’s ideas and their ideas, and to teaching. Being a university president is a natural evolutionary point, because part of what a president does is enable others to learn and do research.”

Shirley Tilghman

Shirley Tilghman

Shirley Tilghman had no plans to lead an Ivy League university when she began her career as a developmental biologist. A native of Canada, she received an Honors BSc in chemistry from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario in 1968, and a PhD in biochemistry from Temple University. During post-doctoral studies at the National Institutes of Health, she participated in cloning the first mammalian gene.

She later led a lab as an independent investigator at the Institute for Cancer Research in Philadelphia, and taught human genetics, biochemistry, and biophysics at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1986 she joined the Princeton faculty as a professor in the life sciences, continuing her laboratory research and also directing Princeton’s Lewis-Sigler Institute of Integrative Genomics.

“Until I was about 45, I thought I wouldn’t do anything except science,” she recalls. “I thought it was the most interesting thing a person could possibly do. But as you become more senior in a field, you begin to assume more responsibilities, and you’re gradually weaned from the bench. As I started taking on these new roles, I found I enjoyed them. Rather than being annoying distractions from science, they were something I looked forward to. That was the beginning of my recognition that I might someday do something other than be a working scientist.”

Karen Holbrook

Karen Holbrook

Karen Holbrook recalls splitting her time between research and administration from the beginning of her days as a cell biologist. After receiving BS and MS degrees in zoology from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, she later earned a PhD in biological structure at the University of Washington School of Medicine in 1972. She stayed at Washington through 1993, running her laboratory in the morning, where she studied fetal skin development and genetic skin disease. Her afternoons were devoted to administrative responsibilities as the associate dean for Scientific Affairs.

“In both places, my job was to facilitate the goals of other people in science,” she says. “In my lab, I tried to do it through mentoring, working side-by-side with post docs and students. And my role in the Dean’s Office was to do the same thing – to facilitate programs and to bring people together to meet their goals and move forward in their scientific areas.” She continued in academic administration, moving to the University of Florida in 1993 to become vice president for Research and dean of the Graduate School. From 1998 to 2002, she served as provost at the University of Georgia, and then went to Ohio State to assume her current post.

The Scientific Method

To no one’s surprise, the ACE survey reported that university presidents face significant challenges. Relations with faculty, legislators, governing boards and alumni top the list. Planning, fundraising, budget issues and personnel issues occupy the most significant amount of a presidents’ time.

Jackson, Holbrook and Tilghman unanimously agreed that experience using the scientific method has made their jobs easier. “As a scientist, one is educated to attack complex problems, to think about the right questions that lead to solutions,” says Jackson. “In many ways, as a university president, one is always confronting complex issues that one needs to approach in a certain way.”

“In planning and in problem-solving – both in trying to understand what has happened in the past and what should happen going forward – it is helpful to have a science background, to be able to figure out what kind of data you want to gather, to know how to analyze it, and to know how to use it effectively,” adds Tilghman. “That’s been very helpful for me as a university president.”

Collaboration is Key

Collaboration is also an essential part of the scientific process. Likewise, a college president needs to know how to work with diverse personality types. Indeed, the ACE report noted that “the imperative of rapidly changing economic, demographic, and political conditions suggest the need for adaptability and diversity in education institutions and their leaders.” “In science, you build and value networks of people. Nobody does anything alone,” contends Holbrook. “Scientists also learn to work with diverse groups of people. When I left my own lab, I had people there from Turkey, Australia, Korea and China, all united by the love of the same thing: the science we were doing.”

Holbrook also likens the grant-writing process to the fundraising duties of university presidents. “You need to build a case and a story for what it is you want to accomplish,” she says, “and sell it to somebody whom you want to believe it and support it.”

Roadblocks to Success?

Is there a glass ceiling in science? In education? If there is, these three women broke through it. Jackson notes a few obstacles early in her career that she says were “rooted in the obstacles to women becoming senior scientists and having senior positions in academia and other places.” The wheels of her career were really set in motion once she became a tenured professor at Rutgers, she recalls.

While Holbrook says she didn’t see a lot of roadblocks in her way, she did feel she had to prove herself repeatedly. “As a woman we don’t always have the kinds of doors that are open just by the normal ways through which men typically interact,” she believes. “I do think you always have to sell yourself a little bit more as a woman. But I must say, I didn’t have huge obstacles.”

When it comes to obstacles, Shirley Tilghman claims she had blinders on. “I was never in a position where I felt that either my superiors or my colleagues were treating me differently than they treated their male colleagues,” she says. “As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to believe that some of that was tunnel vision on my part. And I actually think that is one of the most important ingredients to succeeding in science – to be able to ignore or be unconscious of what could be perceived, and what may be intended to be slights and ways of putting you down because you’re a woman. If they happened, I didn’t see them.”

Do What You Love, Love What You Do

Today’s female college presidents stand as role models for all women in science. They advise young women to challenge themselves, find something they love, and pursue it fervently. “If you have a real passion for your science and what you do, do the very best you can. Get in, enjoy it, and don’t worry about the next step,” advises Holbrook. “The next steps come naturally if you’re doing something you enjoy and are absolutely committed to. There will be lots of doors that are opened.”

“My major advice these days is, ‘Don’t let anybody make you into a victim,’” says Tilghman. “Just don’t let it happen. If you don’t think of yourself as a victim, you won’t be a victim.”

“Scientific careers are full, rich, and challenging. They allow a person to use her intellect at the highest level,” adds Jackson. “I think there still are some obstacles, but the very fact that you now have women scientists in leadership positions at the highest levels in academia and in senior positions at other places should itself let young women know what is possible.”

The Future of Leadership

Will we see more women and more scientists ascend to university presidencies? There are certainly plenty of programs in place to make that happen. The American Council on Education has an Office of Women in Higher Education that provides national direction for women’s leadership development and career advancement through a variety of programs. For example, they sponsor national leadership forums to identify and promote women for senior-level positions, especially presidencies. Some 200 of the 1,000 women who have attended these forums have become college or university presidents.

Bryn Mawr College hosts a Summer Institute for Women in Higher Education, offering intensive training in education administration pertinent to the management and governance of colleges and universities. And the national Executive Leadership in Academic Medicine program offers executive training to expand the number of qualified women for leadership positions in academic medicine and dentistry. “These programs are preparing women just marvelously for leadership roles, and giving them the confidence and tools they may not have,” notes Holbrook. “The fact that they’re booked tells you that there are women who are interested in this as a career route.”

Taking the Lead

Tilghman hopes to see not only more women, but more scientists taking the lead at universities and colleges. She credits Bruce Alberts, president of the National Academy of Sciences and a scientist himself, with a sea change in which biologists are increasingly engaging in public affairs. “He set a tone that said a scientific career for people who want to do this can include public service,” she explains. “I’m hoping that the next generation will see these kinds of jobs not just as service – as in ‘Oh, it’s my turn to pay back’ – but as really enjoyable jobs.”

“The very fact that women have ascended to the presidencies of some of the major institutions in this country, and among those are women who happen to be scientists, I think hopefully portents some open doors that haven’t been,” concludes Jackson. “It certainly shows what women are capable of doing. And I think that’s the real message.”

Also read: Overcoming Imposter Syndrome to Empower Women in STEM


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