Ivy League's female presidents meet at Harvard to discuss gender equality and education

From SignOnSanDiego:

When Drew Gilpin Faust, the dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, takes over at Harvard on July 1, half of the venerable league's eight schools will be led by women.

[Brown President Ruth] Simmons said the four women, including University of Pennsylvania President Amy Gutmann and Princeton President Shirley Tilghman, have carved a path that will grow among the Ivies and beyond.

“When it starts to become the issue of being the last Ivy League school to have a woman president – who wants to do that?” Simmons said at a forum sponsored by Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. “This is a league and this is a league based on competition.” ...

The presidents each acknowledged their relentless ambition, but at the same time said they wound up at the head of four of the world's leading universities almost by accident.

What was not an accident, they said, was that Tilghman, Gutmann and Simmons were all young Princeton administrators groomed by former president Harold Shapiro.

“He would deny credit,” Gutmann said. “But, he should get credit.”...

Tilghman, a biology professor and researcher, addressed the subject again Wednesday, saying she needed determination to advance in science, but also blinders to the obstacles she faced.

“There may be signals out there that tell me I can't do this, but I'm not going to recognize them,” she said. “Adrenaline is a great hormone.”

So are “chocolate and Diet Coke,” Gutmann joked.