Devi Shastri | Oshkosh Northwestern

Joe Sienkiewicz/USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin

Joe Sienkiewicz/USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin

OSHKOSH - Colleen McDermott knew she wanted to be a veterinarian since she was a little girl.

In the '70s, she became the first in her family to attend college. But she lacked a strong support system.

"I had negative role models," she said. "I would talk to our local veterinarian and he told me, 'That's the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. A woman wants to be a veterinarian? You're just going to take a slot from a man who needs it to raise his family.'"

She refused to back down, channeling naysayers' comments into her motivation.

As she pursued post-graduate study and turned toward an academic career, questions about professional and personal life arose. Could she be a professor? What if she wanted to meet her kids at the bus after school? She learned from her male counterparts and made the rest up as she went.

In many ways, the world of two decades ago held different challenges. McDermott started her career at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh in 1991, two years before the passage of the Family and Medical Leave Act.

"When my son was born, my department chair called me three days later and said, 'When are you coming back again?'" she said. “And I came back. Five working days off and I came back to work."

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McDermott moved up through the ranks of leadership in higher education, becoming chair of UWO's biology department, then the associate dean of the College of Letters and Science's math and science division, and, this summer, the college's acting dean.

Today, she and three other female leaders stand at the helm of the university's academic colleges, making history as UWO's first all-female group of academic deans. They are the only such team in the UW System. And with every step, they are showing their successors, students and faculty the importance of gender equity in higher education.

For McDermott, the effort is personal.

"There was no one ... who could show me how to do it," McDermott said.

She wants to see more women in the science faculty, in engineering, computer science and other traditionally male-dominated fields, to serve as role models for students who may be driven to change a major because they are underrepresented.

Academic deans are visible and accessible role models for the students and faculty around them — teaching classes, hiring faculty, pioneering programs that connect the university with the community and shaping their college’s curriculum and culture. Their visibility to students means their ability to be campus role models for marginalized groups is elevated.

McDermott is working to make graduation requirements simpler for her students and to prepare her college for the university's largest influx of professors when UW-Fox Valley and UW-Fond du Lac merge with UW-Oshkosh this summer under a system-wide restructuring plan.

Her colleague Elizabeth Alderton, interim dean of the College of Education and Human Services, is preparing her students to for the ever-changing landscape of education in Wisconsin, and to connect future leaders to rural and statewide social service organizations like Boys and Girls Clubs that could benefit from fresh ideas and skill sets.

In the College of Nursing, Dean Judy Westphal is creating partnerships in the community for her students to get more real-world experience and is keeping students and the college competitive through a new three-year doctorate of nursing program.

Barb Rau, dean of the College of Business, is reworking her college's culture from the ground-up to teach students that there is more to a successful professional life than simply having a strong resume and portfolio.

They are accomplished academics in their fields and aim to model how their students — themselves future leaders and academics — should push public discourse, engage outside of their fields and support higher education's quest for knowledge.

Thursday marks International Women's Day 2018. The theme of this year's celebration is #PressforProgress, a worldwide call for gender parity following a year demonstrations and conversations about women's equality in the workplace, politics, activism and beyond. And higher education is no exception.

An analysis by USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin of the gender breakdown of deans across the UW System found that just over 40 percent of academic deans in the system’s four-year schools were women, as of mid-January.

National figures from the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education statistics show that since 2006, over half of all students graduating with every level of degrees — associate's, bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees — are women, raising the question: What challenges remain in achieving the same breakdown across university leadership?

Women leaders make gains in UW System

The state of women leaders in higher education (in the UW System and nationally) is difficult to summarize, in part because there is little recent and widespread data on the issue.

The gender breakdown of deans in the UW System is not collected centrally and schools handle their own efforts to support and recruit women leaders, said UW System spokeswoman Stephanie Marquis.

Recent hires in central administration show a large increase in the number of women. In 2016-17, 12 of 17 new hires, transfers or promotions at the director-level and over two-thirds of all new hires, transfers or promotions were women. At the university level, Marquis said many recent hires have been women including UW-Whitewater Chancellor Beverly Kopper.

"Times are changing and you're really beginning to see a shift," she said.

USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin individually requested and compiled the gender breakdown of the academic leadership at each UW System school: academic deans, who run each degree-conferring college; provosts, the No. 2 university leader who oversees academics for the whole campus; and chancellors, the top leaders and public face of a university.

Though there is no uniform path through an academic career, deanships are a stepping stone into campus-wide positions like provost or chancellor, so the number of women who are deans will show in the number moving up to increasingly prestigious positions of leadership, influence and compensation. The leaders' public engagement is integral to how the university is viewed, which students come there to study and how they give back to the school and city.

In the UW System universities, women make up 41 percent of deans and 54 percent of provosts as of mid-January. Four out of 13 chancellors at four-year universities are women.

Those numbers are on par with available comparisons. The University of Minnesota System told USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin that 43 percent of deans in its four-year schools are women. Laura Matthias, executive director of the American Conference of Academic Deans, said the conference does not conduct national research but that women make up half of the organization's nearly 1,000 members.

National survey data from the American Council on Education indicate women hold 30 percent of chancellorships and 44 percent of provost positions.

Advocates familiar with the statistics say the goal should be "gender parity" on each level of leadership. In other words, if at least half of all graduating students are women, that ratio should be reflected in higher education's leaders.

"What we’re seeing is, by and large, in the non-social sciences, is that women are graduating with an equal number of degrees, they're getting the equal number of first jobs, but they’re not advancing," said Heather Johnson, a research assistant professor at Tulane University who prepared the American Council on Education's 2017 report, "Pipelines, Pathways and Institutional Leadership: An Update on the Status of Women in Higher Education."

There are several instances outside UWO where women are prominently in charge.

Eight of the system's 13 universities have over 50% female deans, and UW-Madison, UW-Superior and UW-Whitewater each have both a female provost and chancellor. Eight of the system's 13 campus administrators/deans of two-year colleges (UW Colleges) are women. So is one of the four regional deans/CEOs, and the UW Colleges chancellor, Cathy Sandeen.

Women are under-represented elsewhere in the system, particularly at the state's largest schools and the chancellorship. As of mid-January, women held five of 15 and two of 13 deanships at UW-Madison and UW-Milwaukee, respectively — a major pull on the system's average.

UWO's situation is not permanent. Two of the deans, McDermott and Alderton, are in temporary positions. Westphal started out in an interim position before accepting her permanent role in January. The university also hired a permanent dean for the College of Education and Human Services, Linda Haling, who will start in July.

A remaining challenge to understanding women's issues in higher education is that much of the national research on women leaders in academia is sparse or outdated.

Johnson is one of the few researchers nationwide who is looking at the issue across higher education.

"Gender research has typically not been very famous," Johnson said. "I've been told by multiple academic mentors to not touch it until I have tenure because it's unpopular and it will be hard for me to advance in the academy if this is my mantle. The people that give grants, the people that write checks — it's a small field, and it's difficult to get that kind of funding or traction. People don't believe that it's an issue. They don't really want to deal with the reality."

Johnson said there are several barriers that could keep women from advancing, including the "maternal wall" (the idea that childbearing and rearing often lines up with the timing big career decisions), burnout and compensation discrepancies.

But she also theorized that as roles in academic leadership have shifted to be more demanding — even department chairs find themselves balancing more complicated roles — many began moving away from those positions. It's a hesitance some of the UWO deans noted, too: No one ever described the dean's role as fun, Rau laughed.

"So there's been this kind of step back," Johnson said. "I think if you're in higher education, I think that's kind of known, but I don't think, outside of the ivory tower, it's very known."

A different time

Barb Rau, the dean of UWO's College of Business, is acutely accustomed to the feeling of being the only woman in the room.

It was early in her undergraduate career in engineering that she was working in a co-op program, shortly before her gender would drive her to change her career path for the first time.

She couldn't shake the feeling that she was expected to prove something beyond her own competence. The hostile work environment was a form of sexual harassment, she said.

It was early in her career, and Rau stood at a crossroads. Her decision to stay or leave would change the trajectory of her career.

She decided to change her major. Engineering just wasn't worth the discrimination, she said. In business, she thrived.

Things got tough again when Rau and her husband decided to start a family. This was the second time she saw a setback in her career. She hit the so-called "maternal wall."

"The question that I had before me was do I want tenure or do I want a family and children?" she said.

Worried about dedicating herself fully to parenting and a tenure position, Rau ultimately chose having a family over staying at Rutgers University, a Tier 1 institution.

"You do make choices," Rau said. "Every day you make the choice of whether you're going to see your kid play ball or work on this paper that the deadline is looming. It's not necessarily that we are super-women. It's that we make choices every day."

Joe Sienkiewicz/USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin

It may have been in part because of a lack of support, she said, but her decision was also an individual choice she attributed to her personal circumstances.

"Obviously, many women don't have the luxury of taking a step down and staying in a great job like I did," she said.

Rau was hesitant to apply for the associate dean position in UWO's College of Business in 2015. She wasn't sure about the demands of a position in upper administration, until the concerns and frustrations of her co-workers made her go for it. She knew she had ideas that could help.

"My level of confidence that I can make a positive impact was greater than the fear," she said.

Two years later, Rau became the first female dean in the history of UWO's College of Business.

The support and camaraderie of other women remains invaluable to the dean.

"I think the fact that I have three female colleagues has made me feel far less vulnerable in this position than I would have felt if I had male colleagues in these roles — that I'm the only one and if you screw up, everyone will make the connection between the screw-up and the gender," Rau said. "I think women in leadership roles feel that a lot."

She thought back to a person's comment when she became pregnant with her first child while working on her doctorate. It was a joke, she explained, though the comment stayed with her nonetheless, as an example of the era she’d lived in: "What a waste of human capital."

Deans face new higher ed challenges

The four women who lead UWO's academic colleges are quick to note that nothing comes without sacrifice.

"We're constantly a role model, and we're showing how you maneuver through life and that it's not easy all of the time," said Alderton, dean of the UWO College of Education and Human Services. "Hard work pays off. In the end, there are rewards. This is a great job."

The deans are less than a year into their roles, and newness brought them together for strong collaboration and communication they said was unique to their cohort. They center their efforts in a philosophy they call "servant leadership," which Westphal defined as: "How can I help others be successful?"

The deans are operating in unpredictable times. The outlook is more entrepreneurial, Rau said, as universities try to understand how to negotiate taxpayer expectations with dwindling state resources.

The uncertainty of a restructured UW System is one such major challenge on the horizon. Colleges face budget cuts as a response to declining enrollment, an issue that at its extreme, has driven UW-Stevens Point to propose cutting 13 majors (while adding or expanding 16 programs) and consider faculty layoffs.

Like all university leaders, the deans are searching for the best way to hit a moving target.

Joe Sienkiewicz/USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin

Johnson noted major financial, political and structural changes at universities could put women's issues on the back burner. Within higher education, simple retention of academics who work their way up into leadership remains a concern.

"The number of academic jobs is just drying up before people’s eyes," Johnson said. "There was this large pool where if you got a Ph.D., you probably got a job in the academy. That used to be the case and it’s not the case anymore."

Nationally, the American Council for Education's "Moving the Needle" initiative has a threshold for women's success in academic leadership — that 50 percent of university presidents are women by 2030. If equity can be proven at the highest level of the university, they believe, the trickle-down effect would indicate parity at all leadership levels, said Sherri Hughes, associate vice president of ACE leadership.

Hughes said her research shows women's experiences in academia to be "uneven," but that the many describe subtle or not-so-subtle social signals that they are unequal to male colleagues.

"Women can be in a room with a whole bunch of people and everybody has a Ph.D., and the men are referred to as Dr. So-and-so and the women are referred to as 'Ms.' or 'Mrs.,'" Hughes said.

Joe Sienkiewicz/USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin

At UWO, Rau's focus is on these subtle interactions, which she links to "emotional intelligence." Her challenge in the College of Business is to work with people, even beyond gender, on their communication styles.

Rau said the key to enabling better staff communication lies in challenging people without making them compromise who they are.

The women at UWO are quick to acknowledge their good fortune and to credit the progress that has been made in higher education. The four are symbolize the importance of a lesser known fight for gender equality: to simply be in the room and have the power to effect change.