August
27, 2004
MHC
and Smith Cohost “Women’s Education Worldwide” Conference
Photo
by Ben Barnhart
Keynote speaker
Amartya Sen talks to MHC students at the Women’s
Education Worldwide 2004: The Unfinished Agenda conference. |
Women
are urgently needed as leaders in politics, government, and
business, as well as science and technology. That is the conclusion
of a historic first meeting of heads of 29 foremost women’s
colleges and universities from five continents who gathered in
western Massachusetts June 2–4.
At a conference titled Women’s Education Worldwide 2004:
The Unfinished Agenda, presidents and academic deans vowed to
increase collaboration in their essential mission of preparing
women for leadership roles. The conference was cosponsored by
Mount Holyoke and Smith colleges.
The group affirmed the key role of women-centered education in producing leaders,
both professionally and as agents of social change. In recognition of the collective
power of their institutions, participants took steps to form a larger alliance
that will speak up for the importance of women’s education worldwide and
become an international force for women’s advancement.
“Advancing educational opportunities for women across all ethnic, racial,
age, and socioeconomic groups within each of our countries and across the world
continues to be the great unfinished agenda of the twenty-first century,” said
Joanne V. Creighton, president of Mount Holyoke College. “Our goal is to
encourage our students to take their place along with men in the highest reaches
of the professions, society, and government,” she added. “At the
same time, we believe that, by working together, women’s institutions can
encourage progress on other crucial social issues, including social justice and
expanding economic opportunities for women.”
Smith President Carol T. Christ stressed the importance of preparing students
broadly for leadership in the contemporary world, and also emphasized the need
to produce women leaders in science, engineering, mathematics, and technology.
“In countries without free and compulsory primary education, gender inequities
manifest themselves as early as the primary school level, making women extremely
vulnerable to poverty and deteriorating economic conditions,” said Christ. “As
educators, many of us are particularly concerned with the underrepresentation
of women in science and engineering, critical professions in today’s world
and ones in which women have made much less progress than we would like to see.”
Haifa Jamal Al-Lail, dean of Effat College in Saudi Arabia, said that women at
her college “think about what women lack with respect to the political
arena.” She affirmed her institution’s commitment to a deeper discussion
about preparing women for leadership in political and economic spheres. The president
of Sookmyung Women’s University in Korea, Kyungsook Lee, spoke of her institution’s
successful use of the Internet to reach women who
would otherwise not have access
to education.
Keynote speaker Amartya Sen, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics and Lamont
University Professor Emeritus at Harvard University, encouraged the conference
to think of women’s education both broadly and politically. Basic education
for women holds the potential for “facilitating radical social and economic
changes that are so badly needed in our problem-ridden world,” he said.
He presented empirical evidence that basic literacy and numeracy enable women
to find their voice in the family, village, and beyond, as well as to substantially
improve their own quality of life and that of their children. Education increases
women’s potential to become agents for social change, he noted, and that
is what has drawn fire from conservatives and sectarians in all parts of the
world who increasingly seek to deny women access to education or restrict its
content.
The institutions participating in the conference ranged from those with long
histories, such as several Asian colleges and leading American women’s
colleges of the historic “Seven Sisters,” to some that are less than
a decade old. One, Asian University for Women, is still in the planning stages.
Effat College was founded in 1999, and Kiriri Women’s University of Science
and Technology in Kenya is only two years old. Kiriri’s vice-chancellor,
Rosalind Mutua, said she wondered, “Will we get there?” when people
spoke of their schools’ origins more than a century ago. But she was encouraged
after hearing others talk and realizing that her institution, “the only
secular women’s university in an area stretching from Sudan to Limpopo” (the
northern province of South Africa), faces many of the same problems confronting
well-established colleges.
The challenges that women-only colleges face broadly reflect the circumstances
of their origins as well as their social contexts, said Amrita Basu, director
of the Five College Women’s Studies Research Center, in summarizing the
conference. Those located in countries where gender segregation is widely approved
or mandated may struggle to offer a full range of quality courses comparable
to what would be found in universities with male students. In societies where
coed higher education is the norm, single-sex institutions are often stigmatized
and must repeatedly justify their existence.
Basu said she was heartened by the response of the institutions present to the
difficulties of offering single-sex education in a globalizing world that, ironically,
presents “greater obstacles to women’s education than in the past.” Among
the obstacles are active suppression and a lack of state and financial support,
as well as corporate aid that is often limited to information technology areas
and does not extend into “broader-based forms of liberal education.” Despite
this, she noted, officials of the colleges and universities represented at the
conference stressed “the value of broad-based, open-ended communication,” emphasized
the importance of developing women’s voices, and demonstrated “an
underlying recognition that the goals of women’s education are the goals
of creating a more tolerant, pluralist world.”
According to Mount Holyoke dean of faculty Donal O’Shea, the three-day
meeting represents a first step in building cooperation and exchanges among institutions
worldwide. “Not only is international collaboration essential to pushing
ahead on a global agenda of educating women,” he said, “but partnership
and communication will open countless opportunities for our
students to understand the multifaceted complexities of this new, global century.”
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