SOUTH HADLEY and NORTHAMPTON, Mass. -- 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 from
June 2 to 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 co-sponsored
by Smith and Mount Holyoke 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, conference
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 socio-economic groups within each of our
countries and across the world continues to be the great unfinished
agenda of the 21st century,” said Joanne 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 College 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 under-representation 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 Allail, 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 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 over 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 co-ed 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 which, ironically, presents “greater obstacles
to women’s education than in the past.” Among the obstacles
are active suppression as well as a lack of state and financial
support, along with corporate aid which 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.”
Many of the participants testified to obstacles limiting women’s
participation in scientific fields, both educationally and professionally.
Keynote speaker Sheila Widnall, Institute Professor of Aeronautics
and Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and
former secretary of the U.S. Air Force, said that although there
have been increases in the number of women studying, teaching and
practicing engineering in recent years, “never has there been
such a need” for their greater involvement “in a world
of resource constraints and environmental challenges.” She
called upon women to take roles both as specialists and integrators,
but agreed with Elizabeth Boylan of Barnard College that women risk
sacrificing their careers if they become interdisciplinary integrators
before they have proven themselves as specialists.
Many of the institutions participating in the conference have strong
science and technology programs where, they reported, their students
thrive in a women-only setting. The campus of Korea’s Sookmyung
Women’s University is a testing ground for the latest wireless
technology, according to the president. Its students, who are definitely
“not afraid of machines,” have become adept at operating
in a sophisticated electronic environment, she said. Smith College
provost and dean of the faculty Susan Bourque said that women scientists
and engineers trained in science programs that are embedded in the
liberal arts bring a broader perspective to their professions. “We
know that in all the scientific fields there are critical ethical
and scientific issues [where] we want women’s voices at the
table, a variety of women’s voices, and even women leading
that conversation,” she said.
The conference also took up a range of issues that are common to
all, with participants sharing strategies and solutions for recruiting
talented students from a variety of social and ethnic groups, attracting
women to the sciences, raising funds, awarding financial aid and
meeting the needs of older students and those with family responsibilities.
Conference materials (PDF)
