panel08

Monday, February 25, 2008. Panel. "Reacting with Dr. Keohane"

MS. HABERLANDT: Good morning. Before we start the panel this morning, our local arrangements chair, Sue Groesbeck, has a quick announcement, and I have a quick announcement, and then we're going to move right into the business of the morning.

MS. GROESBECK: I'm not a volunteer but, simply, I live here. Two things. One. The Klingenstein. What a fabulous opportunity, and three of the four women out of 20 at the Klingenstein are here. So we congratulate them.

And about tomorrow night, the oyster roast versus the dinner up at the Harbor Town Yacht Club. The Harbor Town is full, and there are still 11 spots on the oyster roast. The bus will leave from here, go to Bluffton. You will be dropped off at an old gas station that is now Eccentricities, that is filled with exotic and wonderful gifts. And three more shops will be open with wine and cheese, and then you'll be taken to the oyster roast, which is inside. You don't have to worry, it's not outside. It will be a wonderful oyster roast in the only operating oyster factory on the East Coast. And it is one of the national things. It's protected. On the May River. We'll have a beautiful sunset and I think it's something not to be missed, because it's something you can't arrange for yourselves.

And then you'll be bused back here afterwards, and there will be wine and cheese and beer, and then the traditional foods that go along with an oyster roast. This is stuff to eat if you don't like oysters, obviously. So you must see Bruce right after this meeting to sign up for that, because we're calling in the oyster count. Okay? I'm in pink. You can ask me otherwise where to shop, what to do. Don't necessarily go to the people at the desk, because they come from Ireland and if you ask them where to shop and they send you to the mall, "Nyet." So see me. They're Irish!

MR. GALBRAITH: (In an Irish accent) Well, I was goin' ta tell you some other things, too, but maybe they're irrelevant, eh? Seriously, if there are any changes on any of the trips, if you're not going, that will free up a spot. Let me know any of that, too, please. We leave from the lobby for all the trips, according to the way the program is scheduled.

People who attend the NAPSG annual meeting have first crack at enrolling your folks in the seminar. Those brochures are fresh off the press. In case you want to get one of those and send it in -- they usually fill up -- they're there and if you want to have somebody from your school, go grab one and send it in. We already have one registration for next November's seminar.

How many people would be interested in starting a list of people that have rented cars that might share space as a ride back to the airport when you depart? Would you be interested in finding somebody like that? Because we'll start a list and you can sign up, and then somebody can contact you, or you can contact somebody that signs. Thank you.

MS. HABERLANDT: This is a really important announcement. It has to do with the president of this august institution, the national association. If anyone has a Verizon LG phone charger, she's here with her phone, but not her charger, and feeling very disconnected. I think that's highly therapeutic, but she doesn't seem to agree with me. (Hand is raised in audience) Great! So would you find Diana? God bless you.

Now, on a more serious note, as we said yesterday, today this morning's panel is really designed to involve this entire group in a conversation about leadership and, in particular, about women in leadership. Each member of the panel will now introduce herself and offer some preliminary remarks. The hope is you'll be thinking about questions that have been inspired by the conversations so far and Nan's great opening address to us yesterday. So involve yourselves, enjoy, and thank you all for being here, and I'm turning it over to Burch.

MS. FORD: Thank you, Susan. Thank you, Diana. I look forward to borrowing that charger.

The remarks that Nan made yesterday were so rich and so provocative, there are so many things to say on the subject, and having been the head of a girls' school for 15 years and prior to that having been in really wonderful co-ed boarding schools and the mother of boys, obviously gender is a pretty powerful issue for all of us, but certainly one that I have given a lot of thought to.

My remarks are a whole range of things, so just bear with me. But in terms of women's ways of leading, some of the things that occur to me are that women have had an advantage in some ways of having watched men and so, therefore, having some insight or at least some observations and knowledge of how men operate, as well as from their own experience, the feminine way, in addition to the masculine way.

It reminds me what Jean Baker Miller wrote, Towards a New Psychology of Women. I don't think it's a dated book. It's not a new one, but it's something I would recommend in terms of issues of gender if anybody is interested and has not read it.

I think that the most effective kind of leadership includes a repertoire of both the traditional feminine ways of leading and thinking and operating, as well as the traditional masculine ways. But I also think it's important to think about -- and this was suggested again by Nan's remarks -- having a repertoire so that it's really the task that determines how one leads, not only one's own particular inclination. I think that women leaders are often expected to be both, to be both a provider and the protector, the mother and the friend, but not to be too much of either one, and I think that's a difficult road to walk.

I think it's important to teach girls leadership, so that they have some intellectual framework, as well as whatever might be what they have learned through observation, experience, and mentoring. I think that they should have the opportunities to exercise those roles in a very conscious way, and that where possible, the psychological space is provided for that.

I think we all play to our socially assigned roles and, therefore, what our experience is likely to be. Therefore, what our strengths are likely to be, and therefore, what our goals are likely to be. So I don't think it's an accident that with female political candidates, you hear a lot about health and education; and with male candidates -- and I know I'm being very stereotypical -- you're likely to hear more about the economy and the military.

I think the price of power is important to think about in terms of women, and what Nan was talking about again, the éminence rose, I thought was a wonderful phrase. But that kind of leadership or the power behind the throne is socially safe. It's still power, but it's socially safe, as is flirting in an office or anyplace else.

In a conversation I was having last night with someone, the observation was made about heads of school that many heads of school are not married, that they are divorced or single. That's an interesting observation, the question being, obviously, what does that mean in terms of the emotional demands as well as the time and the energy and the rest of it, and what impact that kind of leadership might have on either the diminished role of a spouse and what cost that have, as well as what it would mean for the dynamics between the two, all of which one ultimately connects with the issue of gender roles and what Nan was talking about seeing at Duke, as well as at Princeton.

There was the phrase in the Duke study, "effortless perfectionism," and the expectation of women for themselves, and assuming that that was also a public expectation of them. It was interesting to me also in terms of what we know about leadership, and again as Nan said, that over the ages and in almost every culture leadership has been associated with masculinity. I think because that's the norm, anything that's not the norm is always going to be somewhat suspect. And I think that that's an issue as well, and I don't think it's just with men. I think it's something that we have all learned and therefore it's internalized in women, as well as men.

This fall there was a survey done on women voters apropos of the upcoming elections. Thirty percent of the women interviewed said they wouldn't vote for a woman, no matter who it was. I thought that was a pretty interesting observation, and it echoed for me something that I heard in co-ed schools for a long time about the student head of school, who might have been the class president up through her junior year, but then for the senior year, well, if a really qualified girl comes along, then she would be elected, but until then -- and girls would be saying this just as a persuasively as the boys would.

So I don't think that what Nan talked about last night in terms of the Duke study and what she's seeing at Princeton is really surprising. I think that's been happening all along, but I think it may be likely to be more articulated at the college level or even the postgraduate level because up until then, girls have been doing what they're supposed to do, which is to be dutiful and to be successful at what their jobs are. But when it gets to the point where people are starting to get married and starting to then carve out their adult life, that it's not surprising that mating is a primary goal.

Emerson talks about how we are animals first, and that that is our primary role. And in relation to the comment about whether we're seeing this in our schools, I think that while the opportunities and access for girls and women have changed dramatically, I'm not sure the gender roles really have. In fact, I think at younger ages they're more retrograde than ever, and in a more sexualized role than before. I think that a girl's first duty -- and this is all helped by our culture -- is still to be pretty and appealing to boys, and her second duty is to be accommodating to them. And while girls can still be enormously successful along the way, that is a current that I don't think ever, ever really goes away.

You quoted de Beauvoir as saying one is not born but one becomes a woman. I think that's a great quote, and it reminded me of Shakespeare's comment in Twelfth Night about greatness, that some men are born it to, some men achieve it, and some have it thrust upon them. And I think that that's absolutely true about being a leader, as well. And I think in response to what we can do with that, we can provide early on the opportunity for girls to be leaders, to exercise that, to develop a frame of reference, and a way of seeing themselves, as well as seeing other girls and ultimately women, as leaders. And the Princeton plan about Pathways to Public Service is excellent, enabling women to come back to that, if there are times in their life when they have to step away from it for the other things that are of vital importance to us all. It's pretty primitive, but that's who we are, as Emerson reminds us.

So those are some thoughts, and I hope I haven't gone on too long. We'll turn it over to Stephanie.

MS. HULL: Good morning. I'm Stephanie Hull, head of the Brearley School, in my fifth year. There are a number of points that struck me, and they really aren't in any particular order. The first one was the question whether the implications of the belief that women lead differently, and as I looked at that, as I thought about it, it was interesting to hear people's thoughts on that implication. I think seeing people like Condoleezza Rice in a press conference, watching Segolene Royal run for president in France, being the first woman candidate, watching Hillary Clinton's campaign unfold, it seemed to me that once the belief exists among some of people, it's really important for women to buy into that belief that it's a possibility, because in order really to manage the media, in order to deal with the judgments that are put in front of a person, really, one has to think about the fact that some people believe women lead differently, that they should lead differently, and that there are ways in which one has to react or consider reacting to events, because one is being perceived not only as a leader and a candidate, but also as a woman in that role.

I agree with what has been said so far, especially what Burch just said about whether the world would be better off if women had a distinctive way of leading. I think it's interesting to think about whether women's distinctive way of leading could then infuse the way that men lead; that men could look at that as they see more women as role models, as leaders. Because one of the things I see happening -- certainly has happened in my own life -- is that when you look for role models in leadership roles, you aren't necessarily looking at women, depending on the profession that you're in. Certainly in schools and girls' schools, women, young girls can look up to women as leaders of girls' schools, but there are many professions in which you're hard-pressed to find a woman who is a leader in that position, so you're looking to a man.

And I think further, in a lot of cases, there's a cultural issue that you might not be looking to a woman or a man who looks anything like you or who comes from the same cultural background or the same ethnic background as you do. So there's that as well. There are styles of leadership that one embraces, that one tries out, that have nothing to do with who one is.

I think as much as we all got used to seeing Margaret Thatcher behave the way Margaret Thatcher behaved, I think if you had a 30-year-old Latina woman, for example, behaving like Margaret Thatcher because that looked like a successful way to lead, to her, I'm not sure we could get used to it. I'm not sure she could pull it off. And yet, who does that person look up to? Who is the role model in politics, for example, for that woman to take on, in America, to run for office or to manage a really complicated difficult problem? Certainly women admire her, but not very many women could behave the way she did and still be considered to be leaders and not some entirely different thing that we've all heard said about women leaders.

There's a big question that we'll all begin to address about our schools and the roles that we play in developing women leaders, especially developing leaders who lead in distinctively ways, and that points struck me because I know I sit in many, many admission sessions and tell parents as compellingly as I can that one of the best reasons to send a girl to a single-sex school is that the stereotype of how one behaves is really taken away; that girls don't behave in civil and cooperative and collaborative ways because they are girls. In a girls' school it's because it's the right thing to do, the civil way to behave. It's not because teachers need to be able to manage half of the class, and when the boys are swinging off the rafter, the girls will manage to behave and cooperate and be collaborative.

This year I'm teaching a group of sixth graders, and I witnessed something I thought was quite striking. A couple of weeks ago two girls were in an argument. One girl poked the other girl, and the first girl decked her. She punched her. And within a couple of days they were back friends again. They got in a physical fight and worked it out. And that's something that I think we all think boys do but girls don't do. Girls are supposed to use their words, they're supposed to feel these things deeply. They hit each other and it was over.

So I think that's food for thought, too, when we think about leadership and style because it's not that distinctive a way of solving a problem, yet it completely worked for those two girls. So not a recommendation, but it's worth considering whether women would be free to lead in different ways if there weren't these sort of social judgments being placed on them that that's really not an appropriate way to work something out, it's not an appropriate way to get through a problem.

There's one more thing that I thought about. It's sort of a combination of different points that Nan brought up, that women in our society are socialized to feel more concern about harm to others, and that to be prepared to lead these days it helps to have some exposure to difference and diversity, it helps to have opportunity to try out leadership skills. And for me, there's also the question about whether we should be working on the idea of grooming young people to be followers. There was also the story that Ms. Maccoby told about, "Get that girl who's a follower because everyone else is being a leader."

Well, part of what makes it hard to be a leader is that the followers aren't understanding of what it is to be a leader. And maybe the opportunities to follow would be a way of helping leadership seem more palatable to people. I think when you think about training kids, we train kids to be audience members in assemblies and to listen attentively and respond politely. We teach them to give criticism in different kinds of ways and say something positive and then offer a criticism in a helpful way, but not a nasty and negative way. We teach them those skills of interaction with difficulty and across difference.

I don't know how much we really focus on teaching people to work with someone who's trying to lead them. Certainly it would make us all laugh to think we created people who could follow once in a while, but it's not easy to do that job. It's not easy to know what the leaders feel like, and if it doesn't look at all appealing to girls to be leaders in college, I think we all know why. I think we all know what it feels like to be a leader and to feel that no one understands, and for everybody sort of engaged in this culture that increasingly is about instant commentary, it's about giving instant feedback about what you don't like about something. You're supposed to do that on the Internet so that not only just people around you but the entire world knows what you like and what you don't like.

And to lead in that context, we all sort of block it out, I think, to do the jobs that we do. But to lead in the context where every comment can be broadcast across the entire world instantly before anyone had any time to reflect on it or take into consideration what people have to go through to make the decisions -- that isn't really a compelling context in which to be a leader. So maybe there's some thinking about doing something about the dread of being publicly reviewed that really comes with these positions.

I think in order to get a girl to think about this -- or the same person, really -- I think we need to think about that culture that's created of instant negative feedback all the time. So those are thoughts that I had.

MS. STAMBAUGH: Well, Nan, if we don't give you thoughtful remarks that will help in your study, you at least can know that Hull advocates violence.

You would think that after 33 years of heading a girls' school or two of them, that I would know whether women lead differently or not. But I was very mad at myself as I was reading Nan's talk because I was swayed by her classmates, and they are my peers. I was class of '61 at Wheaton. Because I was thinking, Yes, they do lead differently than men. And then as I went on further with her arguments, I thought, Oh, I have just been led down a garden path here.

I think that there are many styles of leadership, and I think men use them and women use them and they don't necessarily belong in the provenance of one or the other. There are some things that may be factors in women's styles of leadership. I think women try to do it all, and I'm not sure that that can genuinely be said of all men, that all men try. I also think -- and Nan alluded to this last night -- that women get experience in the home, in managing a home and family and husband and community activities. I think women may manage easier than lead. And I think that that is an important distinction about management and leadership.

I do think that having practiced at leadership helps. And again, in her talk she mentioned the experience of women on sports teams, which boys have always had. The business of really going at it hard and then forgetting -- and in a way, it's the decking incident -- that boys have really played hard in a sports contest -- and this is before Title IX -- and then the next day they have to go out and do it again. And women didn't have that experience until the last 20, 25 years, and I think that that has made a lot of difference, that women have gotten stronger through having to go out and face the competition the next day.

I personally think that a female model is more collaborative, but that it can be exercised by women or men. And I think about Peggy McIntosh, who works at the Wellesley Center for Research on Women, and her talk in which she talks about the male model for so long was a mountaintop, a pinnacle, and there was one person on the top, and generally it was a man. And she talked about a butte, and by butte, I think of a sort of a sheared-off mountaintop, where there's more room for people on the butte, and I think that that is a more feminine style of leadership. I think that many women, or men who exercise that more feminine style, look for ways to bring more people up, and I think our women administrative career seminar is one of those things, that those of us who were heads of schools weren't just content that we were the heads of school, but we wanted other people to join us there, and so I think that's a good example of that.

I'm not surprised that college women aren't trying as much. I think the push to get into college -- and Nan alluded to this last night -- is exhausting, and it's also multiyear. You know, it's not just the junior year that's tough, but somehow or other, kids get serious at ninth grade and begin to add to their resumes, so to speak, and begin to think about what's going to look good. I think that they feel like they have earned some time off, and a chance to relax, and I also think that they're thinking of this as a little hiatus, because pretty soon they're going to have to do it all over again in the workday world.

Another thought that may be random here, but those of you who are familiar with the Myers-Briggs Inventory know that there are many effective styles of leadership. So that is another thing that kind of shows us that there isn't just one style of leadership, but that there are many effective leaders who have different qualities.

I think Burch said that she thought it was important to give girls intentional opportunities to lead, and I believe that that's true. In my own school, we did programs like one at Echo Hill in Maryland, where there's a critique after a leadership opportunity, and where the counselors had the girls think about who led, who spoke first, who listened, why, and what made it effective. And that was a very sobering kind of experience for me, that it's not just that you go out and think that the people who do it best are going to be the winners, but what was the process? And what do you get from that?

And I can tell later an anecdote about that, where I had it all wrong, because I really thought that the end result was to do it faster, better, more powerfully, and was shocked when what I was really being graded on was how collaborative, how many other people's voices did we hear, et cetera.

Another final thing: For those of you who have commented about the memorial resolutions, I think one of the things that comes through in those resolutions is how many people were thoughtful about people's moral compass, that often in leadership, it's not the getting something done, but it is the way in which they did it, and I think that's something that men and women can do equally.

MS. UNDERWOOD: One of the interesting things about getting married was I went from being first, with a C last name, to the last name of Underwood. And when Blair said, "Let's go alphabetically," I knew exactly what she meant. That is, everybody said everything you wanted to say. So here I am. I'll be very brief and, I hope, not repetitive.

Kiki called my attention to an article that I had read coming down on the airplane yesterday, which I think Nan will talk about in more detail. But it was Maureen Dowd's comments on the leadership styles of Hillary Clinton and Obama. I don't know whether you have seen that, but I think that will be very fruitful, as Nan weaves that into our discussion.

Nan and I were talking at dinner last night. Now I have a chance to observe leadership in our own industry from the perspective of women and men. My observation is the same as Blair's, I think. I'm not sure women lead differently from men. I really think that many men lead in what the press calls a feminine style, which is exactly what the article says about Obama, and that many women lead in a more masculine way. So I think we do ourselves a disservice to be stereotypical about women and their leadership. I have not seen that in my observations in the last four and a half years in working with women and men who head schools. What I do see is that there are perceptions of leadership styles that trustees have in our industry, that the media has, that are really pervasive, and they will say, "We want someone who behaves in a feminine -- who's collaborative," and so on, and then the immediate implication is: That must be a woman.

I have not seen that as being true. And one of the great lessons I got there was, when I was in my mid-30s, I went to Outward Bound on Hurricane Island. I don't know how many of you had that experience, but it was extraordinarily humbling. I was 38, maybe I was 39, 40. But I had been a head of school long enough to be bossy. And I'm not saying that about anybody at this table, Blair. When they came to pick the captain of these two pulling boats, I was absolutely certain that I would be captain of boat number 1. Not at all. I was pulling the oars in the rear. And I learned a lot at that point about making assumptions about leadership ability; that, in fact, if we can give people the opportunity, you know, there are many kids, many young girls, who never get the opportunity to be leaders. In the middle school they are stereotyped as being followers, or nerds or whatever they're stereotyped as being, and I learned in Outward Bound there are some fantastic people who are wonderful leaders in many different ways that we never would have recognized by their prior experience or anything else. And I think for us there's probably an opportunity to seek out those children who don't actually rise to the surface in that regard, and get them some leadership tests.

Finally, I want to say that some of my former students have told me about their working -- I want to say one thing about former students and one thing about my daughter-in-law. Don't tell either that I said these things. But many of my former students have told me that they have been in working situations and worked for women who were much less kind or supportive and helpful than the men with whom they worked. When I was at Spence, Dusty Heuston was my head and my mentor, and he influenced my life more profoundly than anyone I have ever worked with. Again, a male mentor in a girls' school who had a sense of compassion, but was a tough and good leader.

My daughter-in-law is extremely able. She's in her second year at Georgetown Medical School. I don't see her at all. I don't know if it's because she doesn't want to see me or because she's really studying for tests. But whatever the case, she was a very good athlete and a brilliant scholar, went to Princeton, and was number one on the Princeton women's tennis team. And you know how driven young girls like that are. And suddenly in her junior year she simply quit. "I'm not playing tennis anymore."

I think it's an interesting story, because she's a very able tennis player. She did very well there. She won't even play with my son. I don't know why that is, either. But I don't ask those questions, again.

But it seems to me that this was the example of young women who are absolutely working themselves to the bone, driven from that very fifth-grade perspective. Some girls never get over the fifth grade. I mean, they just keep going in that same seeking, perfectionist kind of way, and suddenly -- I think Blair just said -- "I have had enough of it," and I wonder if what Nan describes isn't kind of endemic in girls in their late 20s and early 30s now. As Blair said, as Stephanie said, they worked terribly hard, and they have gotten to where they want to go and now they just want to focus on what they're doing, and not feel that same sense of pressure. I wonder. It's a very interesting thing. In any case, I pass now on to Nan, who's alphabetically out of order, but much brighter than the rest of us.
MS. KEOHANE: Thanks to all of you for those great comments. I have been scribbling like mad, and I'll be very brief. I had my chance to talk yesterday, and I know from your questions at dinner and breakfast that there are a lot of things on your mind and I want to hear from you all. There's my southern background coming out. I want to hear from you all. I know you have a lot to say.

First, I want to say thank you again for that wonderful award. I have been thinking about it before I went to bed, when I woke up. To be the first to receive an award of that magnitude, which I know you all thought a lot about, means more to me than I can say, and I'm very grateful to you and truly touched.

I also wanted to clarify exactly what I'm doing and where I'm going with this, because I do look forward to all your comments, not only because I find them fascinating but because I am working on a book on leadership, which I still think is a scary thing to do. It's a very difficult thing to write about. I'm a trained political philosopher and I have had now 24 years in a headship position, so to speak, at Wellesley and at Duke, and I'm going to try to put those two things together. But that means thinking about leadership from different perspectives. There's just one chapter on gender specifically, but a lot of what we've been thinking about will come out, I'm sure, throughout the book. So I look forward to your comments.

I'm teaching a seminar at Princeton now. After I left Duke, I went to the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton, and I'm teaching a seminar for graduate students for MBAs who are themselves leaders and they want to continue. And I find that very helpful, too.

So if you have thoughts you don't get to share today, please send me an e-mail. I'm very good at answering e-mail. Not quite so good at answering the phone.

And the last thing I wanted to say was about this article which Kiki drew our attention to and thoughtfully gave me a copy of -- I didn't see it in The New York Times yesterday. It's Maureen Dowd's column. The headline is, ¿Quién Es Less Macho? She's writing about Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and her major point is, his Venus is beating her Mars. Clinton is taking a traditionally masculine leadership style and Obama is willing to show his more feminine side. That's the basic argument. Here are just a couple of quick quotes. "Hillary was so busy trying to prove that she could be one of the boys (Armed Services Committee, war in Iraq, et cetera) that she only belatedly realized that many Democratic and independent voters, especially women, were eager to move from hard-power locker-room tactics to a soft-power sewing-circle approach."

I'm not sure Barack Obama would accept that description of what he's doing, but &endash;

"Less towel snapping and more towel color coordinating, less steroids and more sensitivity."

That's classic Maureen Dowd. And then there's a wonderful phrase a little further on when she talks about how Hillary Clinton took Barack Obama on in Austin. "Obama tapped into an inner chick and turned the other cheek." It's quite a provocative article.

The only other thing I would like to do today is to use one passage in my paper that I did cut out last night in the interests of time. I think it's very relevant in terms of what we have been talking about since what I basically say is, you might put all this in terms of probabilities. The chances that a woman will lead in a way that we might characterize as notably feminine are greater than the probability that a male leader will behave in that way. It's like saying women or females have a distinctive style of writing, or throwing a ball, or expressing emotions, even though some women write hard-ball crime novels or throw overhand and some men write romance novels and talk easily about their sentiments.

A point we've been moving toward in all these discussions, which I find very helpful, is that there is a distinctive style of leadership, which we call "womanly" in the way that Maureen Dowd is writing. Whether that's an accurate way to describe it, I'm not sure -- I think the Quakers and other people in history have used it. Not all of them are women, but we're trying to find some way of talking about this distinctive style and also recognizing, as Burch put it at the very beginning, that people need a repertoire and they need many things that they can draw on as they try to do this very difficult business of leading.

And one final little sidebar: As I was listening to the comments about why women in college may indeed find themselves letting go, getting off the tennis team, stepping back, I found that quite thought-provoking. But then, I have a question. So why don't the guys do that, too? They have been working just as hard. Why don't they do it, too? Or if they do, I still have a lot to learn. Thank you.

MS. FORD: I think what we'd like to do now is invite comments, questions, observations, and we can respond however you like, however we like. There is a microphone in the middle of the room, if you would take advantage of that so we all can hear each other. Step up.

MS. JOHNSON: I still have a headmistress voice, I hope, but I have got a question, building directly actually on what Nan ended up with, because what I have been thinking is, I hate to stereotype any more than men and women, gen X, gen Y, but I wonder if some of this young women in college saying "I'm not going to be fast-tracking" isn't an overlay of the gen Y. I understand some people think that the average child -- they're children to me, the age of may grandchildren, not my children -- but it's anticipated that the average 18-year-old will have eight or twelve jobs by the time they're 38. Well, if you're going to have eight or ten jobs by the age of 38, which job are you going to go for? Which fast-track lane are you going to put yourself in?

And the other overlay, I think -- and this comes from my experience of years of overseeing the New Heads Workshop with many of you dear friends. Michael Thompson, when he ran it, observed that women on average were ten years older than men when they came into their first headship. It still is, until we get seahorse models, the women who have the babies. Well, try it! But I think the generation of young women I see in their late college, early 20s, and again, overlaying what Aggie said, the head candidate pool are very aware that many of the people just ahead -- maybe their older siblings, cousins, whatever -- waited until their late 30s, early 40s to have babies, and found they couldn't. And I hear them. I hear them as candidates in searches saying, "I'm going to wait a little bit and have that second baby."

So I think there are multiple factors here of which you all have hit a lot of them. But I'd love to hear people bounce back at me. Thank you.

MS. FORD: I'd love to comment on both pieces, but the one about college women who have been so accomplished -- I think that's very interesting, but it doesn't stop there. Women are more than 50 percent in medical school now, in law school now, in dentistry. Apparently they're not quite there in MBA programs, but that drive is still continuing. But I do think the issue of timing is a very critical one in terms of people stepping back and then wanting to come back in again, which is why the Pathways to Service or whatever the Princeton program is called, I think is so important.

And I thought it was wonderful to hear last night -- I was talking about successors to various heads stepping down, and in one school the new head who's just been appointed is a woman, and she is 60, and it seems to me that's a milestone of sorts, in terms of just what you're saying about when people can do what they do, particularly women, because it's not going to be a straight trajectory if they're going to be wives and mothers. So it's more layered, as you were saying.

MS. KEOHANE: I'm very proud as a grandmother to tell you -- since I take my granddaughter to the Museum of Natural History -- that I know the seahorse model. The males bear the babies. I wouldn't have known it until six months ago. You probably knew that.

But thinking about this business of women either working harder or stepping back, Burch mentioned the "effortless perfection" mentality which we found at Duke, that women have to be smarter, prettier, better, but most of all, more groomed, and not ever appear to do anything about it. The notion of waking up at 6:00 a.m. to put eye shadow on before a class still boggles my mind, but they do just that. And so they have to be perfect, but they also, as Kiki and several of you have pointed out, have permission to step back, so they both have to be better and they also have permission to get off the tennis team. Maybe that's part of an answer to my question. Most guys still don't have permission to do that. But the traditional sense that women are less necessarily expected to excel at high-powered jobs means they have permission to try that. And maybe guys might like to, as well, or maybe not. I don't know. But I think that's worth pondering also.

SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: The last generation or the generation ahead of that, there has been a great migration in our thinking about leadership and our thinking about women in leadership, and we have before us people that started leading 30 years ago or more. My question is: Would you please describe how your own leadership has changed during that time, given the influences of our society's changing thinking about leadership, and your own personal experience in leadership and the growing maturation processes as you go through these years?

MS. STAMBAUGH: I think for those of us who started a long time ago, we didn't have an intentional goal about leadership, and we didn't prepare for something. I think what happened in the last 30 years was that -- Stephanie talked about technology, and I think all of a sudden, we realized that we had to prepare for a new way of doing things, and so we had to learn. We had to go to school, we had to do workshops, and all of those kinds of things. So I think that at first, it was sort of seat-of-the-pants, and then the size of the issues grew larger. I mean, security was not an issue that we thought much about in the 1970s, and the expectations of parents for their children were very different. Basically, even then, I think that parents expected the school to educate and that parents would do the rest.

That changed in the 1980s, where parents really looked to the school to do all of it, as women went back to work and that kind of thing, so that we were giving advice to parents about parenting, we were doing all kinds of things. And then we had to learn more.

So I think that I would say that the 30 or 40 years was that period. Now people go to school to learn how to use technology or how to lead. You read a book about it, just as parents are reading books about how to raise their children. In the '70s, you did it, it came naturally, supposedly.

MS. GROESBECK: I have several ideas right now, and one of them is that I felt pretty terrific this morning, and I didn't realize that approaching 60 as a new head in a school was sort of momentous. I have lots of years left to go, so I am one of those nearing 60 who's just going into a new school. So I have a daughter, Cornell, first in her class, now a veterinary surgeon. She was a swimmer, one of those perfect everything, who has decided to do surgery three days a week because she loves rock-climbing, mountain climbing, she's married. And I do think it's the overlay.

I totally agree with Kiki that it's not that she's stepped off. They have just looked at what we've done and, in my case, what her mother has done, and gave up so much that she is finding a balance that is magnificent. I don't think it's that she has burned out, thrown away her swimming. She was a downhill ski racer, a swimming national, and then at Cornell became the coxswain, because she's little and smart, for the men's heavyweight team. One woman, 40 men. This is not stupid, right? So this is a magnificent young woman who has said, "I have this wonderful career, and I'm going to be able to have children, and I'm going to be able to do both in a lot more manageable way than giving it all," because of the things that many of us did.

That's one little item. So I think it's the gen X thing, and she could have a much bigger salary, but that it's not as worth it to her. That's one thing.

I was able to go to a Center for Creative Leadership about seven years ago in a mixed group. My partner was the president of Ghirardelli Chocolate. You observe each other and you give all this leadership feedback. It was one approach, and it was a magnificent week.

This past fall, I took the Center for Creative Leadership course for women and it was structured entirely differently. The leadership research at the Center for Creative Leadership is approached in an entirely different way. They do a string-connected activity earlier in the week and the whole approach was different. Very powerful women. The Canadian electricity person and the person who runs all the Las Vegas casinos. These were very powerful women.

So part of it is that we really only talk about leadership -- we might talk about, well, there's a woman head. Will she be replaced by a man or a woman, as a fact that she's a woman and how she's replaced. That's our conversation. It's within one industry.

But when I looked at the approach to leadership within the Center for Creative Leadership, it was fundamentally different, and the tests they gave us and the feedback they gave us were different. Certainly Myers-Briggs and all the standard stuff, but there was another layer. I offer that.

Lastly, there's this nag, there's this terrible worry that I have, and that is, we have fewer female superintendents from the public schools than we had in 1950. There are fewer females than there were in 1950. When you go on stats on line, we are at the president's level -- and I went on last week -- $60,000 year to year, experience to experience, behind men, per year. And so there's still something going on.

Now, that isn't to say that there are magnificently paid women in our industry. And we're willing to do it, because we're so excited to lead a school. So I offer that as just one of those rubs.

The last item, there were 20 fabulous scholars at the Klingenstein, four women. The men just let us make sure that we had the present for the professors, and we would not have gotten anything done at the Klingenstein without four women. And it was interesting how we fell right into it. That Annie and Catherine and I and Michelle -- they couldn't have gotten anywhere without us. Sorry.

MS. HULL: First one of your comments. I think to seem to be critical of a woman who manages to create that balance is what will end up causing the problem. If we can't appreciate that someone can take leadership and put it in the context and create balance, then I think it really works against the notion of creating women who take on leadership roles. So I hope it doesn't seem that we're saying that in order to be leaders, all women have to take on that full-bore, you know, all-firing leadership role.

But I do think, at the same time, that statistically it does seem unlikely that everybody will want to create that kind of balance and everybody will be able to create that kind of balance. What seems to be happening is that people are too often saying, "I can't hope to create the balance, and therefore, I just need to get out of all of it or most of it."

I think it would be wonderful actually to have more examples of holding up that person who does some leadership, because that's what makes her happy, and doesn't feel that in order to do it, you have to give up every single thing. Certainly there are lots of us who don't have the perfect balance to demonstrate, but we try to advocate balance. We talk about this in our schools, and then we go work 17 more hours. And so I don't think that we necessarily have to be getting it right in order to say that it's the right thing to do, but that example seems like a perfect way -- bring that person to assembly, you know, once a year and have her talk about how she created it and what the drawbacks are of that approach for her, too.

But it just seems as though there must be more people who would like to try some. Maybe we need to create more of an atmosphere of some being uplifted, and not necessarily saying, "If you don't run for president of five organizations then you're not really trying," or, "If you haven't given everything up, then you're not really doing the job right."

MS. FORD: I can just add, I think part of the challenge is the tyranny of the right. I didn't mean that politically. But getting it right. That there is a way to do it, and I think what we all know is that that's not really what humanity is all about, and part of what's difficult is the judgments about whichever way is too much this, too little that, and if there can just be room for whatever works for individuals and institutions, however they make those combinations.

SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: I would be interested in your comments about a phenomenon that I see which is that men do seem to be dropping out, in my opinion, and seeing numbers are even greater than women. I'll give you some points. For the first time in popular culture we're seeing movies where the hero is a slacker and the woman is a perfectionist, an achiever. In seventh grade we're seeing all reading scores drop, but boys precipitously and girls not so much.

My question is: The third evidence you have already mentioned is that the men may not be dropping out in college because they're not there. They have already dropped out. You have got more and more, higher and higher percentages of women going to college and graduating from college. To what extent are men not able to compete or not choosing to compete? I think I heard recently a speech where if you extrapolate the number of men graduating from college in 1957 to the present, you can extrapolate the last man will graduate from college in 2064. That's seventh-graders' extrapolation, so we're using that.

The question is: In the face of the Hermiones of the world, are the men giving up? You know, they don't want to do that kind of perfectionism, they're so good at it, and is that happening in high school and elementary school and junior high school, and is perhaps the women who are dropping out emulating that, or maybe trying to raise, push, the slackers they see around them up in the way men used to with their poor men who aren't achieving? Just for your comment.

MS. HULL: All right, I'll show some leadership. You know, there's a lot in that, in those statistics. I think they're interesting. I was a freshman dean at Dartmouth College the first year that more than half of the admitted class was female, and it raised concerns in that environment. People were actually worried about the culture of the school when that happened. And so I think a piece of it is that there's this sort of metalevel on which we would worry about whether there were too many girls going to college. But I think in a perfect world, there might be 50 percent girls and 50 percent boys, but for so long in the perfect world there were 100 percent boys, and the girls who could get their fathers to see that education was important.

So I don't worry so much about a shift in the other direction in that balance for a short period of time. I guess I wouldn't extrapolate that no men would graduate past 2064. I think, though, that it's because we have those conversations that it causes concern. If you pit the girls and the boys against each other for spots in college -- which you do in co-ed schools -- this is what happens; that you get people who will fight like crazy to get their spot in the school and be exhausted by the time they get there, boys and girls.

But when cultures start to demonstrate to boys that they can be a hero and still be a slacker, that some perfectionist girl will come along, I'm not really sure that that flows into the argument quite the way you might think it would, because you can still be the hero of the film. You know, you can be the Harry Potter and the Hermione does all the things that need to be done so that he's not dead. But it's still the Harry Potter series. It's not the Hermione Granger series.

So there is that model that, you know, although she supports him by being a perfectionist and having all of her homework done all the time, her job still is to do what needs to be done so that he looks okay and stays alive until the end of the story.

You know, it's really not quite the same thing. There's not an offshoot -- maybe there will be someday -- where she is in the film by herself and those boys are clearly in her way and she doesn't really need them; she can do without them. But she couldn't be a character without them, and that's something I think that speaks to girls, too. All the adults in these communities of girls' schools read these books and think about them along with the kids, but it's not quite the same thing. In the books where the girls are the heroes, when they solve things, they're not as appealing. They're not appealing to the girls, either. You can't really sell that to the girls, either. So you have to have them read the Harry Potter books and we have to read those books and talk about that with them, but that's also part of that conversation. She's not that exciting. She's considered to be kind of boring and a pest. But she always knows what she's supposed to do and she pulls through in the end, and then the boys kind of fumble along, and they dust themselves off, and say, "Okay, well, thank God Hermione was there and she did her homework."

But in the end, you know, she's not the one who saved the world. She's just the one who keeps them alive until they pull themselves together enough to save the world.

MS. FORD: The young éminence rose.

MS. STAMBAUGH: I think one other thing about the reading example that you gave, that boys are less interested in reading. I think that schools are caught right now. I think schools are one of the last places that change. Witness the yellow school bus. Witness our nine-month-a-year calendar, et cetera. And it seems to me that schools are really caught knowing what's going to happen with print and nonprint material, and I think that we haven't changed the way we teach reading, and so we're kind of in the middle of something there. We all know that the stereotypes have been that boys are faster with technology than girls. Boys took to it earlier than girls, and boys have done more with it than girls. Notice who's the head of Microsoft and Apple, and what have you. They're not women. There are women who have helped along the way, but they're still men.

So I think that's really what you're seeing there, and that probably is something that we're going to have to think about, how we teach reading as well as what Stephanie just said about what they read.

MR. BURNS: What Stephanie just did, when you took that mike, was to assume a risk on behalf of the greater good. And I wonder where that fits into the gender formula. But that's not my question.

I would like to examine the styles we assume as men and women on the path to top leadership in schools. One of the predictable transitions is the vision head to head, perhaps the head of upper school to head. That's a classic transition. The man who is a command and control leader and who demonstrates perceived strength will be a successful division head. When he gets to the head's job, he's going to have to become more collaborative and more feminine, et cetera, and he may or may not succeed.

The woman who becomes a division head, if she does, and demonstrates collaboration and the feminine side is not likely to be perceived as successful, and might not get the shot at becoming a head of school, even though she might be more effective as a head than she was as a division head.

How do we teach each other the importance of those transitions and where you're going and how to control and how to reinvent yourself and how to be what you need to be perceived to be, et cetera? That seems like a very complex path.

MS. UNDERWOOD: I think one of the greatest things we can do is to mentor our division heads as heads. And yes, there are stylistic differences. I'm not sure they're all gender-specific. But there are certainly division heads who manage differently, one from another. What I find is that what we don't do for the people who are our number twos in various and sundry roles is give them enough time with us and give them enough really direct feedback about what it's like to be a head of school. I don't think we expose them broadly enough to the kinds of things that a head of school has to do, and I would say I think your question is a very good one, although I see those leadership styles as not only by gender, but by inclination.

But I think you need both of them to be a successful head, more than ever, and I think you can serve a really powerful role as a head of school as a mentor.

MR. BURNS: I did that deliberately. I understand that. But I did that deliberately because I don't think we should fade into "We're all the same and some of us" -- we have defined that as a gender-specific role to a great extent, and I think we shouldn't get off the hook on that.

MS. KEOHANE: Probably some of my colleagues will want to respond further to what you just said, but I wanted to use your question as an occasion to answer it in a sort of sideswipe way. Go back to the question of the 30-year saga, what we've done over our 30 years, which I have been mulling over ever since it was asked.

One thing that comes out here is that sequence is important. That's part of the burden of your question. In what order you take on leadership tasks? What do you learn from them, what do you take with you and what do you leave behind in order to be successful at a different level? And I do believe that this is very much a personal thing, but I take your point that there are ways in which the stages matter.

So let me just say a few very personal things, because my saga was very different. I went from being an associate professor to being president of my own alma mater with no experience as a division head of any kind. It was extremely risky for them and very risky for me. I learned on the job, and I took with me a very (as it turns out) both suitable and unsuitable style of leadership, because I was an ardent second-wave feminist at Stanford in the 1970s. I'm sure you picked that up from my talk last night. That was where I got religion about being a feminist. I certainly wasn't before, even at Wellesley.

And I thought, you know, we all solved all the world's problems in our Stanford feminist collective, setting up courses, editing a journal, et cetera, all totally by talking it through all night until everybody had had their say, and nobody could dominate, and somehow we came to decisions and we were exhausted.

It was a wonderfully collaborative and also very ineffective way to get things done. So naive as I was, I thought, well, I'm going to be president of a women's college. I can probably take a little of this feminine style with me. I probably took a little bit, but it very quickly became apparent that context as well as sequence matters a lot, because in an institution, even an institution as woman-friendly and relatively intimate as Wellesley College, there was no way a feminist style of leadership in that fashion was going to work. I had to make decisions. I was now the leader. People were looking up to me to get something done and move on, and I had to learn how important it is to be able to do that, to collaborate enough so that people know you're really listening to them, not just going through the motions, but be willing to take the heat and say, "Okay, I have heard all these things. This is what we're going to do. Let's all go in this direction."

That was the first thing that I had to learn, and I found that it was very helpful. But Wellesley -- and this is my last sequence point -- had the great advantage, that it had never had any president who wasn't a woman, and therefore, nobody expected me to behave in any unusual way. When you walk into the library at Wellesley College, when you walk into a library at any institution, all the portraits are on the walls of all the former heads and presidents. At Wellesley, they're all women of many different generations. And so I never thought about being a woman leader as anything odd or strange. That was what leaders did.

And the most powerful thing it did for me was to give me self-confidence that I could be a leader and the fact that I was a woman was really not terribly relevant.

So when I got to Duke, which was another step, and another point in the sequence, and a very different context in some ways, people wondered, you know, is she going to make it as a woman leader? I thought about a lot of things at Duke -- varsity athletics, a big medical school, et cetera -- but it never occurred to me I couldn't do it because I was a woman, or I had to do it in a different way.

But the sequence was important, and I think for all of us, the way in which we came to various points on our leadership path may matter more in our particular style, but also in our successes or failures than we even sometimes recognize.

MS. FORD: If I could just add to that -- and I'm very aware of the clock -- the question about who gets to be the upper school head and, therefore, what the sequence becomes, that piece of it I think is really important, and I think that what Aggie said about mentoring is extremely important. But I think the mentoring should take place even earlier than that. We talked a little bit about mentoring girls, but also people in our schools who may not yet have developed the skills, which anybody can learn, but already have identifiable qualities and characteristics and dispositions and inclinations that can promise effective leadership. I think if those people are also identified and talked to about the possibility -- maybe not right now -- but if it gets in their heads, then they can start to identify themselves as potential leaders.

And that's one of the things that happens in the NAPSG seminar. One of the constant themes in the evaluations of the program is that people leave with so much confidence in their ability that they had no idea that they might really be leaders, but because they never identified it and nobody ever identified it for them that has made a huge difference and started that trajectory.

Thank you all very much. It's time for a break, and Bruce has a couple of housekeeping things for us.

MR. GALBRAITH: Thank you so much. The panelists really had a wrestling match about how much to discuss or talk about before, how to prepare, but also stay fresh. It really pulled together well. Susan, you were right.

There's a list outside if you want to sign your names saying "I need a ride to the airport," and I'm asking others to have a look at that, and make a contact with that person.

Nicole Seitz is here signing her books, just until the end of the break. So we have half an hour now, and then we'll be back.

I don't want to embarrass a fine lady at the far end of this panel. I am so impressed by a couple of little things. We made a copy of her speech so that the reporter, Mary Seal, can have these words. But I looked at the speech, and she knew we were running a little long last night. As Nicole Seitz taught me, who learned about Gullah, "We take our time." She said, "You said you wanted to learn about Gullah. You are learning about Gullah."

But she crossed out a lot of her speech and she made it shorter, because she knew we needed that time. And I think that's one of the classiest things I have ever seen.

Thank you. Enjoy the break and we'll be back in here in about half an hour.: return to NAPSG home page