Female Leadership at Harvard: The Cracked Glass Ceiling

The story isn’t new: women make up 5 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs, 19 percent of Congress members, and zero percent of U.S. presidents. By an alleged combination of being perceived as bossy, less competent, and too emotional, women have consistently been denied leadership positions in both the public and private sectors. Surprisingly, however, this phenomenon is hard to find at Harvard.
Based on data collection by the HPR, 57 percent of Harvard student organizations are led by a female president, and the average club’s board is 48 percent female ¹. This data was collected in the Fall 2014 semester from all officially recognized student organizations that listed their current board members on their websites. We excluded explicitly gendered groups; a female president of the Association of Black Harvard Women reflects the nature of the group rather than a victory for feminism. However, we included implicitly gendered groups (like Manifesta, the feminist magazine). This resulted in a sample size of 182 clubs ².
The overall result—that females are near or past leadership parity—is also found in almost every subdivision of the data, whether it be by club category or by size (both as reported by the Office of Student Life). However, if we take a new point of reference—looking at how each club’s leadership compares to Harvard’s average rather than to parity—it becomes clear that some gender bias still does persist.
If we examine the club breakdown by OSL category, it appears that women tend to hold fewer leadership positions in groups that correspond to careers.

Three of the four most male-skewed categories—publications, pre-professional organizations, and political organizations—relate to professional fields where female leaders tend to be underrepresented. Groups surrounding wellness, culture, and religion tend to have more female leadership, but have a much more tenuous connection to careers, suggesting a possible relationship between this data and the dearth of female leaders in the workplace.
A similar skew appears when we look at club size.

The largest groups, which tend to be the most visible and active on campus, have less female leadership than smaller groups do. So while women do hold leadership positions, they tend to be less prestigious roles (using group size as a proxy). Just like in the workforce, female leaders are the office managers but male leaders are the CEOs.
Beyond these major trends, there are more troubling statistics. Still excluding explicitly gendered clubs, 8.2 percent of the clubs have no female representation whatsoever on their board, while only 3.8 percent have no male representation. Nearly a tenth of groups, which tend to be mid-size pre-professional organizations, don’t have a single woman among an average board size of six members.
Despite all of these trends, it can’t be ignored that Harvard is still near or past parity in almost every category. This raises a more normative question: what are we aiming for? Is parity the goal, in which case we have almost all achieved it? Or, do we want to go beyond parity, overrepresenting women in our leadership to help correct the vast imbalance in the workplace? With many clubs heading into an election cycle, it is up to our collective judgment to decide.
 
^1. This trend—that the percentage of female presidents is higher than the percentage of board members—persisted through every way we sliced the data. The reasons behind it, though, are purely speculative. For example, perhaps Harvard’s liberal supermajority has a knee-jerk reaction to vote for the female president, but not for the board, or perhaps women are viewed as more competent visionaries but less competent at the specific skills one would need on a board.
^2. This is out of 406 total officially recognized student organizations, or 45 percent of organizations. The organizations left out tended to be smaller and less active (or inactive) on campus, so while these results may not be generalizable to all organizations, they do give a good idea of leadership parity of the more visible Harvard organizations.
 
Olivia Zhu contributed reporting. Data collection assistance from Antonia Chan, Harry Hild, Priya Menon, Maxine Patwardhan, Ignacio Sabate, Advik Shreekumar, Vikram Sundar, Audrey Zhang, and Olivia Zhu.