Yet Princeton boasts a nearly equal balance of male and female undergraduates and has for at least the past 10 years. And Oppenheimer’s article also highlighted that women are leaders for the majority of student groups. In this light, the lack of female leadership in traditionally male-dominated Princeton institutions like eating clubs and the Undergraduate Student Government is hard to understand. Looking beyond the numbers, we want to probe the reasons that women don’t pursue these types of leadership. Women are not a minority at Princeton; they aren’t discriminated against academically, nor are they barred from pursuing social and extracurricular leadership. And women excel in leading student groups. Our generation of women is fortunate, because we were raised to believe that we can do whatever we want and have been actively encouraged to do so.
Why then, out of all of the potential leaders in the Class of 2013, did not a single woman run for class president? Every student who enters Princeton has demonstrated leadership and academic excellence, and surely more than a few freshman women were student government leaders and valedictorians and won at least a few scholarships in high school, too. What happens to women between the time when they receive their Princeton acceptance letter and the day they matriculate?
We’ve heard various hypotheses for the lack of women’s leadership. Some say women are simply not as interested in networking and running for “less meaningful” positions as USG president and eating club presidents. Others say that women are simply not as qualified as men — especially in the arena of academic awards, where many prizes are given to students who excel in quantitative fields like math and science. Still others suggest that it just doesn’t matter and that even if there are more men in leadership roles, it is a function of individual choice rather than absence of opportunity. There is no active discrimination against women, so there is no problem.
Yet the fact that there is no obvious reason for women’s underrepresentation is precisely what makes this absence of women in leadership so difficult to understand. We cannot, should not and will not blame “The Man.” But we believe there is a more subtle interaction of power that affects women’s confidence in campus life and influences their pursuit of academic and extracurricular excellence. We’re really dealing with two separate issues: Not only are there fewer women in elected leadership, but fewer women run.
Social pressure is a major component. Social, academic and extracurricular lives are inseparable. The people on the Street are the same people with whom we interact in seminar and in student groups. As much as we would like to deny this, how men and women interact on the street is informed by the same mentalities, attitudes and personalities that we adopt when we step into an academic space.
Women may find it difficult to reconcile such a holistic identity. Princeton women don’t lack confidence, but social confidence is reaffirmed by inherited notions of femininity, which are difficult to reconcile with and translate to academic confidence. While both male and female students are socially and academically competitive, the skills and qualifications for men’s social excellence corresponds with the skills required for academic and extracurricular performance. For women, the path to social success is to adopt a mode of femininity that begs different qualifications than the ones required to compete academically. This combination of identities is trickier for women because traditional socially informed notions of femininity do not include aggressiveness, confidence or the proactive pursuit of success, all qualities that would inspire the pursuit of academic leadership. And the more traditionally female women act, the less qualified for leadership they appear in the eyes of their peers, because the leader we envision is gendered male.
In the formation of adult identity, these leadership moments and opportunities are critical to future success in building experience and networking. They are basic qualifications for post-graduate leadership. If women do not obtain prominent leadership positions in male-dominated realms at Princeton, they will be disadvantaged in male-dominated realms after they leave. We’re not blaming women, nor are we scolding men for the seeming correspondence of masculinity to leadership. Rather, we are calling for a critical examination of the way our campus culture subtly discourages women from the pursuit of success on a seemingly equal playing field. Princeton is a school that thrives on tradition, but we should take a more critical approach to the way that tradition affects the construction of gender on our campus. Only then can we begin to unravel the structures that confine students both inside and outside the classroom.
Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux is a religion major from Charlottesville, Va., and she can be reached at ajthomso@princeton.edu.
Editor's Note
Brenda Jin '10 requested her name be removed as a co-author of this column after she disagreed with revisions made during the editing process.
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