ECU professor wants more female leaders

Women are under-represented on more of ECU’s public-facing boards than its Board of Trustees, judging by their online membership lists.

Look at ECU’s Board of Visitors. Its members serve basically as liaisons between the public and university leaders, its website says. Women on the board number 15. That’s 22.4 percent, or about 2 in 10.

Nearly 3 in 10 members of the Alumni Association’s Board of Directors are women. They’re 2.4 in 10 at the fundraising ECU Foundation, about 3 in 10 at the fundraising Medical and Health Sciences Board, and about 2 in 10 among the directors of the Pirates Club.

Women are at their fewest on the ECU Board of Trustees. There are two. They’re 15.4 percent—1.5 in 10—on a panel that wields a lot of power over the entire university. The BOT has never had more than two female trustees since at least 2004, its rosters in the Internet Archive show. At times it had just one. Now look at ECU’s students, all of them. Nearly 60 percent—6 in 10—are women. Why can’t ECU’s public-facing boards be more inclusive of women? Surely, it’s not that hard.

Other parts of ECU do it.

Close to half of the university’s administrators and executives are women, ECU’s Analytics Portal says. Women are nearly 5.6 in 10 among faculty senators, and 5.1 in 10 among teachers in the academic faculty. Among staff senators and all support staff, women number a bit more than 7 in 10.

Student government is a curious exception. Women number about 4 in 10 among SGA executive officers and Assembly members. Under-representation isn’t just about women. Anna Spangler Nelson of the UNC Board of Governors admitted at a meeting not long ago that “some” boards of trustees at the state’s public universities also lack racial diversity.

What about sexual orientation, ideological and other kinds of diversity too? How do those boards of trustees look on those?

Don’t despair, the BOG’s Pearl Burris-Ford said at that meeting. Governors were inclusive this year, she said, increasing the representation of women on boards of trustees from 29 percent in 2017 to 31 percent now. That’s a “big push,” she added. Two-percentage-points in two years. A point a year. A “big” push?

BOG could set a far better example. Women account for 25 percent of the powerful panel that oversees all public universities in a state that’s 51 percent female.

Better still, ECU—the leadership university—could take the lead by working now to include more women on all its public-facing boards. They should reflect the rich palette of diversity of the students, alumni, faculty and staff they serve. When they don’t, it reflects poorly on us all.