How women administrators can increase their numbers.

Women earn more than half the U.S. graduate degrees but hold only about one-fifth of upper-level jobs as higher ed administrators. That's a huge discrepancy. Past and present women administrators have a responsibility to do something about it, Dr. Gayle Hytrek said at the October 2005 meeting of Wisconsin Women in Higher Education (WWHEL).

Hytrek is president of Wisconsin's Moraine Park Technical College, with campuses in Fond du Lac, Beaver Dam and West Bend. Her 2000 dissertation in higher education at the University of Nebraska focused on mentoring as a way to build the next generation of women administrators.

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Why so few women?

Her dissertation, based on a survey of 300 women at the level of dean or above, wasn't how she'd planned it in 1997. She hoped to survey 60 women from each of five Carnegie categories of school across 12 Midwestern states. Women were so sparse in some categories that she had to search 16 states to reach those numbers.

Women are earning the degrees, but they aren't proportionately represented in upper administration, she found. The positions they do hold are mostly at lower ranks, in lower-prestige areas like student affairs and in lower-prestige types of college. "Why, why, why?" she asked.

It's not just a pipeline delay that will resolve itself over time. Women have outnumbered men in graduate school enrollment every year since 1984.