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Duke President Richard H. Brodhead
Toward the end of her remarkable tour of duty as President of Duke, Nannerl O. Keohane commissioned a study known as the Women's Initiative. When the report was published in fall 2003, the Women's Initiative received extensive national attention both within universities and beyond, as it deserved to. A generation after the most overt forms of gender discrimination were brought up for critique and revision in this country, subtler forces persist, impeding full equality of opportunity for women. Under President Keohane's leadership Duke undertook to assess the place we have come to in gender equality with unusual courage and candor.
The comprehensiveness of the Women's Initiative report remains its most striking feature. Rather than studying a single segment of the university community, a team of task forces considered the full set of women's experiences within the university: the lives of women faculty, staff, graduate students, undergraduates, and alumnae as well. Through this breadth of focus, the report was able to highlight issues that link the experience of women across categories, such as the critical role of mentorship. At the same time, the study noted that the most salient issues for women in the university are often specific to their position, so that a women's agenda needs to have many different parts. The relation of the tenure clock to family responsibilities is an issue for untenured women faculty members, but not for the tenured. Childcare is an issue for younger faculty, staff and some graduate students but not, with rare exceptions, for undergraduates. And the pressures on undergraduate women have their own character, which the report is careful to detail.
Thanks to its comprehensiveness, the Women's Initiative has given Duke two valuable assets as we go forward. First, the report has provided us with a detailed checklist of problems and opportunities that we can monitor as we move on, work that the President's Commission on the Status of Women will oversee. Second, the large number of people who played active roles in this venture created a cadre of university citizens, of all ranks and ages, who understand the issues and are committed to constructive change.
As the newly-arrived successor to President Keohane, it will be my responsibility to keep Duke striving toward the goals this report clarified. I have a profound commitment to this effort, and I look forward to working with the whole university community to realize its goals.
Richard H. Brodhead
President, Duke University
November 2004
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