How senior women leaders can claim their power.

Meeting in Ottawa in April, the Senior Women Academic

Administrators of Canada (SWAAC) discussed "Women in Academic Administration: Housekeepers or Groundbreakers?"

The French version, "femmes de menage ou femmes de pouvoir," is closer to "housekeepers or women of power?" To have power is to break new ground, not just to hold a title, the Hon. Monique Begin said in her plenary address.

Begin's record of academic and political power began as executive secretary of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women in Canada. In 1972 she was the first woman elected to Parliament from Quebec. After holding positions as minister of national revenue and minister of national health and welfare, she left politics in 1984 to teach in the economics department at the University of Notre Dame IN. She was chair of Women's Studies from 1986 and dean of health sciences (1990-97) at the University of Ottawa, where she's now professor emeritus.

Power does not come automatically with the nameplate on the door, she found. "One must occupy power in exercising it; one must take power. Nobody gives it to us on a silver platter," she said.

Most women take high-level jobs when invited and with a mindset of service to others, which dooms them to failure or insignificance. Men--and perhaps younger women today--instead go after positions they want and process issues in terms of power and control. That's what women must learn to do, to claim power to break new ground.

Strategy is not a dirty word