The Women Deans Of Europe: Leading The Fight For Gender Equality

FOR WOMEN WHO WANT CHILDREN, OBSTACLES STILL EXIST

Over on the Continent, Nathalie Lugagne, affiliate professor and newly appointed associate dean in charge of the HEC Paris Executive Education, has been teaching on and off since 1997 and quickly pinpoints one of the biggest hurdles women in academia face: the current configuration of tenure tracks.

Lugagne, whose expertise includes cross-cultural management and leadership development and whose experience spans four countries on two continents, has helped HEC Paris implement a special policy that acknowledges the obstacles faced by women seeking Ph.D.s who must spend six to seven years proving their competencies in research and teaching and — most importantly, Lugagne says — publishing in peer journals. “We decided that for women having younger children, and especially for women giving birth, they would have one year more,” she says. “So that was a way to promote diversity in our tenure-track faculty.”

The game is still badly tilted against women in higher education, Lugagne says. If it takes three to five years to get a Ph.D., and another couple of years before a tenure track situation clears up, a candidate who starts at age 28 can find herself at 35 or older before she knows what kind position she’s in. “And it means for a woman that your biological clock is already advanced,” Lugagne says. “So that’s why it’s important to keep in mind that you want to encourage diversity. We think the policy has been quite successful but it’s of course a very long-term policy and you cannot measure that in one or two years.”

A SHARED GOAL TO CHANGE MINDSETS

At HEC Paris, gender diversity compared to the rest of France and Europe is “quite good,” Lugagne says, with 10 women of 40 MBA faculty and seven women among 32 executive MBA faculty — “high compared to other universities.” Like other B-schools in Europe and the U.S., the student numbers approach even or just under 50% for women in full-time graduate programs, and much lower — 25% to 30%, Lugagne says — in executive ed programs. “Like everywhere around the world,” she says.

“What would be great, of course, is to have 50 percent of women faculty, but that is not the case today,” Lugagne says. “What I feel about promoting diversity is that you have to send signals, you have to have symbolic kinds of decisions, and you also have to nurture role models, so that’s the kind of thing we can do.”

As a dean, Lugagne says she has a four-year mandate, and “you cannot change everything in four years, you need a long-term policy. Because when you do something you have to change mindsets and this takes a long time. What is very important is to have that long-term objective as an institution, to have that shared goal within the institution.” With new Dean Peter Todd, who took over in 2015, HEC Paris does have that shared goal, Lugagne says.

STUDENT BIAS PLAYS A NEGATIVE ROLE

Lugagne says a big source of diversity bias in academia remains one of the most intransigent: student assessments. Evaluations of teaching skills consistently produce a statistical difference for women that is 5% less than for men, she notes, “because in the stereotype, the faculty has to have a very assertive style, and this can be a kind of implicit bias against women.”

How to solve this problem? It’s complicated, Lugagne says. “We have to raise awareness in our student body about this diversity bias, this implicit discrimination against faculty. So what we did is, we tried to explain how responsible the students are — what does this mean to evaluate people? I was teaching HR management and one of my courses was about diversity, and I explained the bias we have when we hire people and when we evaluate people, and that that has a consequence on the career path of these women. So that’s something that I try to do, to raise awareness of our unconscious bias.

“The students were responsive. At least we had a debate.”

MEN NEVER GET THE QUESTION, ‘WHAT’S IT LIKE?’

Marion Debruyne wants gender to be irrelevant. In many cases in higher ed, she says, it is.

Yet, as the dean of Vlerick Business School in Brussels tells Poets&Quants, “It becomes a thing simply by the fact that you are interviewing me now on the subject. And indeed I often get that question: What’s it like to be a female dean? Do you want your leadership to do something specific to introduce more diversity in leadership? It’s almost an unavoidable subject, and I think any female dean has to ask herself, ‘What do I do with that? Do I make this part of my platform, or do I have other things that I want to put on the agenda instead?’”

Debruyne, who has been in her position for a little more than a year after 10 years as a marketing professor at Vlerick — following stints at Kellogg, Wharton, and Goizueta — wants other things on the agenda. As she points out, male deans never get the question, “What is special about the fact that you are male, do you want that as a part of your agenda?”

Most important, she says, whether male or female, is the fact that you are a leader in business education. “It’s each of our responsibilities to foster more inclusive leadership and enhance diversity and to be role model ourselves as well,” Debruyne says. “And I do believe that business schools can play a role in making that happen.”

DON’T MISS BY THE NUMBERS: ARE WOMEN REALLY MAKING PROGRESS AT BUSINESS SCHOOL? and A HISTORIC GATHERING OF FEMALE B-SCHOOL DEANS TACKLES GENDER INEQUALITY