UW-Oshkosh’s all-female deans talk of gender progress
Higher education, like other fields, sees underrepresentation
OSHKOSH - Colleen McDermott knew she wanted to be a veterinarian since she was a little girl.
In the ’70s, she became the first in her family to attend college. But she lacked a strong support system.
“I had negative role models,” she said. “I would talk to our local veterinarian and he told me, ‘That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. A woman wants to be a veterinarian? You’re just going to take a slot from a man who needs it to raise his family.’”
She refused to back down, channeling naysayers’ comments into her motivation.
As she pursued post-graduate study and turned toward an academic career, questions about professional and personal life arose. Could she be a professor? What if she wanted to meet her kids at the bus after school? She learned from her male counterparts and made the rest up as she went.
In many ways, the world of two decades ago held different challenges. McDermott started her career at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh in 1991, two years before the passage of the Family and Medical Leave Act.
“When my son was born, my department chair called me three days later and said, ‘When are you coming back again?’” she said. “And I came back. Five working days off and I came back to work.”
McDermott moved up through the ranks of leadership in higher education, becoming chair of UWO’s biology department, then the associate dean of the College of Letters and Science’s math and science division, and, this summer, the college’s acting dean.
Today, she and three other female leaders stand at the helm of the university’s academic colleges, making history as UWO’s first all-female group of academic deans. They are the only such team in the UW System. And with every step, they are showing their successors, students and faculty the importance of gender equity in higher education.
For McDermott, the effort is personal.
“There was no one ... who could show me how to do it,” McDermott said.
She wants to see more women in the science faculty, in engineering, computer science and other traditionally male-dominated fields, to serve as role models for students who may be driven to change a major because they are underrepresented.
Academic deans are visible and accessible role models for the students and faculty around them — teaching classes, hiring faculty, pioneering programs that connect the university with the community and shaping their college’s curriculum and culture. Their visibility to students means their ability to be campus role models for marginalized groups is elevated.
McDermott is working to make graduation requirements simpler and to prepare her college for the university’s largest influx of professors when UW Fox Valley and UW-Fond du Lac merge with UW-Oshkosh this summer under a system-wide restructuring plan.
Her colleague Elizabeth Alderton, interim dean of the College of Education and Human Services, is preparing her students to for the ever-changing landscape of education in Wisconsin, and to connect future leaders to rural and statewide social service organizations like Boys and Girls Clubs that could benefit from fresh ideas and skill sets.
In the College of Nursing, Dean Judy Westphal is creating partnerships in the community for her students to get more real-world experience and is keeping students and the college competitive through a new three-year doctorate of nursing program.
Barb Rau, dean of the College of Business, is reworking her college’s cul- ture from the ground-up to teach students that there is more to a successful professional life than simply having a strong resume and portfolio.
They are accomplished academics in their fields and aim to model how their students should push public discourse, engage outside of their fields and support higher education’s quest for knowledge.
Thursday marks International Women’s Day 2018. The theme of this year’s celebration is #PressforProgress, a worldwide call for gender parity following a year of demonstrations and conversations about women’s equality in the workplace, politics, activism and beyond. And higher education is no exception.
An analysis by USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin of the gender breakdown of deans across the UW System found that just over 40 percent of academic deans in the system’s four-year schools were women, as of mid-January.
National figures from the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education statistics show that since 2006, over half of all students graduating with every level of degree — associate’s, bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees — are women, raising the question: What challenges remain in achieving the same breakdown across university leadership?
Women leaders make gains
The state of women leaders in higher education (in the UW System and nationally) is difficult to summarize, in part because there is little recent and widespread data on the issue.
The gender breakdown of deans in the UW System is not collected centrally and schools handle their own efforts to support and recruit women leaders, said UW System spokeswoman Stephanie Marquis.
Recent hires in central administration show a large increase in the number of women. In 2016-17, 12 of 17 new hires, transfers or promotions at the director-level and over two-thirds of all new hires, transfers or promotions were women.
At the university level, Marquis said many recent hires have been women, including UW-Whitewater Chancellor Beverly Kopper.
“Times are changing and you’re really beginning to see a shift,” she said.
USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin individually requested and compiled the gender breakdown of the academic leadership at each UW System school: academic deans, who run each degree-conferring college; provosts, the No. 2 university leader who oversees academics for the whole campus; and chancellors, the top leaders and public face of a university.
Though there is no uniform path through an academic career, deanships are a stepping stone into campus-wide positions like provost or chancellor, so the number of women who are deans will show in the number moving up to increasingly prestigious positions of leadership, influence and compensation.
In the UW System universities, women make up 41 percent of deans and 54 percent of provosts as of mid-January. Four out of 13 chancellors at four-year universities are women.
survey data from the American Council on Education indicate women hold 30 percent of chancellorships and 44 percent of provost positions.
Advocates familiar with the statistics say the goal should be “gender parity” on each level of leadership. In other words, if at least half of all graduating students are women, that ratio should be reflected in higher education’s leaders.
“What we’re seeing is, by and large, in the non-social sciences, is that women are graduating with an equal number of degrees, they’re getting the equal number of first jobs, but they’re not advancing,” said Heather Johnson, a research assistant professor at Tulane University.
There are several instances outside UWO where women are prominently in charge.
Eight of the system’s 13 universities have over 50 percent female deans, and UW-Madison, UW-Superior and UW White water each have both a female provost and chancellor. Eight of the system’s 13 campus administrators/ deans of two-year colleges (UW Colleges) are women. So is one of the four regional deans/CEOs, and the UW Colleges chancellor, Cathy Sandeen.
Women are under-represented elsewhere in the system, particularly at the state’s largest schools and the chancellorship. As of mid-January, women held five of 15 and two of 13 deanships at UW-Madison and UW-Milwaukee, respectively — a major pull on the system’s average.
UWO’s situation is not permanent. Two of the deans, McDermott and Alderton, are in temporary positions. Westphal started out in an interim position before accepting her permanent role in January.
The university also hired a permanent dean for the College of Education and Human Services, Linda Haling, who will start in July.
Johnson is one of the few researchers nationwide who is looking at the issue across higher education.
“Gender research has typically not been very famous,” Johnson said. “I’ve been told by multiple academic mentors to not touch it until I have tenure because it’s unpopular and it will be hard for me to advance in the academy if this is my mantle. The people that give grants, the people that write checks — it’s a small field, and it’s difficult to get that kind of funding or traction. People don’t believe that it’s an issue.”
Johnson said there are several barriers that could keep women from advancing, including the “maternal wall” (the idea that childbearing and rearing often lines up with the timing big career decisions), burnout and compensation discrepancies.
But she also theorized that as roles in academic leadership have shifted to be more demanding — even department chairs find themselves balancing more complicated roles — many began moving away from those positions. It’s a hesitance some of the UWO deans noted, too: No one ever described the dean’s role as fun, Rau laughed.
“So there’s been this kind of step back,” Johnson said. “I think if you’re in higher education, I think that’s kind of known, but I don’t think, outside of the ivory tower, it’s very known.”