Duke's Women's Initiative is now four years old and still improving the campus experience for women at Duke, President Richard H. Brodhead and other university leaders told alumnae this past weekend.
The initiative launched a series of efforts designed to improve the campus experiences for women at all levels of the Duke community -- faculty, staff, students and alumnae. At a session during the Women's Health & Wellness Weekend, sponsored by Duke Alumni Affairs and the Women's Center, Brodhead said Duke officials are tracking the success of the first steps and looking at what other efforts could be taken.
"When Duke finishes enumerating the things that have been done in the past five years, you have to stop and say that is impressive and that is important, but you can't stop and say that the problem is solved," Brodhead said. "I can only offer you a sense that we have worked hard, but that is our obligation, to continue to work hard on these issues."
The President's Council on Women
Most of the work started by the Women's Initiative has now been turned over to the President's Council on Women. The council meets regularly and is charged with developing new initiatives, such as professional development opportunities for junior faculty, educational summit that would bring together graduate and professional students, faculty, alumni and members of the local community and continued study of undergraduate campus culture.
The panel is chaired by President Richard H. Brodhead. Donna Lisker, former director of the Women's Center and new associate dean of undergraduate education, serves as vice-chair.
In addition to Brodhead, the session on the Women's Initiative included comments from Donna Lisker, associate dean of undergraduate education, and Sterly Wilder, executive director for alumni affairs.
Regarding the faculty, Brodhead noted that in 1997 women held 26 percent of regular-ranked faculty positions. By 2002, just prior to the Women's Initiative, that figure was 28 percent. That number had increased to 32 percent in the last measurable year.
Academic departments are charged with getting the best candidates for positions, but to also look harder for women. "The level of leadership is the fulcrum," he said. Duke watches how salaries compare among the faculty, and it has an accelerated scheme for "repairing parity of salaries" for women.
For employees, Brodhead said Duke has seen its most significant progress on the child-care front. In addition to the on-campus Children's Campus, the university also works with an expanding list of regional child-care centers to help Duke employees find child care off campus.
Other areas of progress include a three-week parental leave policy for employees who just became parents and a flexible work policy for faculty in special situations, even after childbirth and maternity/paternity leaves. Tuition benefits for staff members have been expanded, offering up to $5,000 at any accredited school outside Duke to broaden skills and increase chances of advancement. All of these programs came out of findings in the Women's Initiative.
Lisker, former director of the Women's Center, discussed the findings of the Women's Initiative relating to students: "effortless perfection," in which woman feel they must "look cute, be funny, be quiet," as one student put it, and the "hook-up" culture on campus, which Lisker said "doesn't bring out the best. The bar was set very low, socially."
One solution to improving the campus culture for women has been the Baldwin Scholars program, a four-year undergraduate women's leadership curriculum set up in 2004. Lisker is its co-director. Eighteen first-year women students are selected each year, spend a residential sophomore year, intern with Duke alumnae their junior year, volunteer in the community and study in intimate seminars. One of the scholars' projects, in which they collected and displayed campus party posters that were disrespectful of women, seems to have changed the tone of social life on campus, Lisker said. There were 117 applicants for the Baldwin Scholars program last year, compared to 78 the first year.
Wilder discussed a new alumnae steering committee that was set up for the women's wellness weekend and will be in place to suggest future programs that will engage alumnae. The Duke Alumni Association will also be surveying alumnae about other campus weekend programs for women. Existing regional programs, such as the Women's Forum in Washington, D.C., and New York, could be replicated in other cities through Duke clubs.
Mentoring for students by alumnae is another focus, as well as President Brodhead's new Women in Leadership subcommittee within the President's Council on Women. (See accompanying story.)
The session on the Women's Initiative was just one program at the Women's Health and Wellness Weekend. The program began with a keynote address by Kimberly Jenkins, a Duke trustee and entrepreneur who holds three Duke degrees.
"What I have come to realize," Jenkins said, "is that the real bottom line for women's health is about culture. A state of a women health is dependent on the culture she lives in. To change women's health, we must change the circumstances by which we live our lives."
Besides mentoring sessions with current women students, the weekend offered panel discussions on women's health issues at every stage of their lives, exercise and movement instruction, and concurrent presentations on trauma, nutrition, faith and healing, and how to recharge your batteries. On Saturday morning, Tracey Gaudet, director of Duke Integrative Medicine, spoke on the role that health plays in physical, sexual, mental and spiritual well-being.
In his welcoming remarks, Brodhead cited the close links that women's education has to the very beginning of Duke University. In his office, Brodhead has framed the letter that Washington Duke wrote in 1896 to the Trinity College administration in which he said he was withholding a gift of $50,000 because the college had not met the terms of his challenge grant. However, Duke said, he would double his gift to $100,000 on the condition that the school admit women.
Brodhead quoted the university's patriarch as stating that Trinity College would have to "open its doors to women, placing them in the future on an equal footing with men, enabling them to enjoy all the rights, privileges, and advantages of the college now enjoyed, or to be hereafter enjoyed, by men. Otherwise, this offer shall be null and void."
Since then, the university -- and the rest of society -- has come a long way, he said. Women gather together at Duke for a variety of reasons: to renew friendships, to discuss matters of shared concern and pool shared wisdom, and "to check up on this place," he said.
"This is a test we set for ourselves to what extent have we succeeded, and are we continuing to succeed, in making this a place where the same opportunities are equally open to women and to men, and the quality of the experience offered is the same for women as for men."