The gender crisis is in corporate pay, not college enrollment | Opinion
Want your daughter to go to the C-suite? Send her to a women’s collegeWhen women constitute most of the student body, there is no alternative but for those female students to step up and lead in student government, club sports and even just answering questions in the classroom. It is in these settings that we teach women bravery. Frankly, women’s colleges are excellent at producing women leaders. And yet since 1960, 80% of women’s colleges have closed.
When you dig into the data, the real story is women are only beginning to catch up to the men at the collegiate level, and they have a long way to go in the workforce. Much like Ginger Rogers, today’s women are doing everything the men are doing but “backward and in high heels,” to which I would add, “for less pay.”
In Texas we have a saying about hard work that goes something like this: “You just gotta pull yourself up by your bootstraps and get to work.” It seems as though women are doing just that. Some are calling that a crisis. I call it success. Maybe we should fan the flames of some real crises like pay equity or the closure of women’s colleges. The boys are doing just fine.
Carine M. Feyten is chancellor and president of Texas Woman’s University. She wrote this for The Dallas Morning News.