Brown U. prez: ‘Women are socialized to be compliant’
March 23rd, 2011 at 10:45 am by Ted Nesi under General Talk
The Daily Beast caught up with two Ivy League presidents – UPenn’s Amy Gutmann and Providence’s own Ruth Simmons of Brown University – and asked each one to “grapple with what’s holding smart, young women from seizing leadership positions” on elite college campuses in the United States.
Here’s some of what Simmons, who took the helm at Brown in 2001, had to say:
Ruth Simmons, the president of Brown University, acknowledges the power of “residual biases” and barriers, but suggests that the gender divide is also a product of cultural norms.
Simmons says women at Brown “participate with a sense that they belong.” But she adds that women are “much more likely to accord the spotlight to others.”
“Women are socialized to be compliant, that’s what pushes us along,” says Simmons, who has a warm, but no-nonsense demeanor. “We go to class. We sit in our chairs. We take notes. This compliant behavior allows us to be successful, it’s true, but the compliant personality is not the personality that wants to control. The compliant personality wants approbation.”
The full article is here.
(photo: Brown University)
Tags: brown university, higher education, ruth simmons, women
Nesi's Notes covers politics and the economy in and around Rhode Island for WPRI.com. (Twitter: 
Very interesting. Of course, President Simmons provides a terrific contemporary role model. I was interested in her comment about note-taking. I’m not sure exactly what she meant, but I know it reminded me that when I was at Brown, the women students were much more conscientious than the men about taking notes. I wasn’t a great note-taker at all, and to, to make the situation worse, I missed many classes because of my journalistic activities, and I clearly remember that on the eve of an exam, on more than one occasion, to catch up I would go over to the women’s dorms and ask one woman or another in the class to let me read her notes. And, God bless them, they’d do it. M. Charles Bakst ’66
Great story, Charlie – though methinks procuring class notes wasn’t your sole motivation for ambling over to the women’s dorms on occasion! Thanks for commenting.