Recently, an 18-member committee of students, faculty, and staff at Princeton University released a 100-page report on the status on women students in leadership positions at the university. The Steering Committee on Undergraduate Women’s Leadership survey found that women students are less likely than male students to seek leadership positions. And today, women are less likely to run for leadership posts than women at Princeton a decade ago.
Committee chair Nannerl O. Keohane, Laurance S. Rockefeller Distinguished Visiting Professor of Public Affairs at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School and former president of Duke University, stated that alumnae and current women students had told the committee that “they had been actively discouraged from running for the most prominent roles.”
The study also found that women at Princeton are more likely than their male counterparts to earn academic honors. However, men are more likely than women to earn the highest honors such as class valedictorian and prestigious graduate fellowships.