Institutions, organizations and professions worldwide are being "feminized." The two most common signs of the phenomenon today are 1) the growing raw numbers or percentages of women participants 2) awareness of a growing demand for traditional feminine traits (see Daniel Pink's A Whole New Mind.)

Jane Genova

This phenomenon presents business opportunities for higher education.

Some of the statistics are familiar. For example, by 2007 there will be 75 males in college for every 100 females, down from 78 in 2000 (NCES).

Perhaps not so familiar is the fact that in some well-paying professions, women now dominate. (Dr. Romy Froehlich, University of Munich) In public relations, for instance, women now fill 75 percent of the slots. Take a look at Madison Avenue today, and you'll find many fewer examples of "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit."

There's also another facet to the phenomenon. Despite the entry of women and their progress in educational and professional occupations, there is still a glass ceiling. That constraint on mobility, some observers contend, attracts educated working women to return to full-time motherhood. More than 50 percent of Gen X women in households with $120,000 incomes don't return to their careers after maternity leave (Reach Advisors). In previous generations the return-to-work rate has been as high as 67 percent.

Higher ed's opportunities

Intellectually and politically, society has come a surprisingly long way since Larry Summers got into the soup for his reference to alleged female hard-wiring. The Economist reports in its August 3rd issue that this issue is currently being explored, aggressively. In its July 31st edition, Newsweek described research that is related to what may be unique in the female brain. Can a savvy higher education institution boost its research funding by developing an expertise in gender-related issues?

Another way to go involves males in low-income families. Today only 31 percent of low-income college students are male, reports Jacqueline King, author of Gender Equity in Higher Education." The conventional explanation for this is that lucrative blue-collar jobs are still available and attractive to males. And that's not usually the case with females. However, blue-collar paradise may be imploding. Look at the Detroit sector of the American auto industry for example.

A third opportunity may emerge from higher education's partially re-configuring itself. The goal: help males and females diversify their current ways of learning and working. Think about re-introducing one-gender schools and courses. Re-write textbooks with more male role models. Encourage some projects that don't require collaboration (which is generally viewed as a female strength). Thought leaders in numerous professions are predicting that niches and/or custom-made services and products will be the growth engines of the near-future.

The Vanishing Male

It's now a well-known statistic: Females make up about 57 percent of college students (U.S. Department of Education). That percentage is expected to rise. As a business issue in higher education, administrators are searching for legal (think Title IX) and politically correct ways (think Larry Summers' gender problems) to re-create gender parity.

Jane Genova

Last achieved around 1980, gender parity is a growing economic concern, both for higher education and for American society. As the August 28th U.S. News & World Report's special college edition points out, the vanishing male shrinks the pool of prospects for dating and eventual marriage and lowers the prestige of the college's brand name (it's still a man's world). It also limits the advantages of diverse points of view in and out of the classroom.

Meanwhile, a global, technologically-driven economy demands the knowledge base and intellectual skills that traditionally come from attending college. Without them, will men wind up with no entrée into good-paying jobs or unemployed? There's even talk of males morphing into the next welfare group.

Manufacturing is one place where those good jobs used to be found. Males once held 60 percent of them, now it's 14 percent. At the same time, the low-paying service sector has grown 260 percent (Business Week). Is this a goodbye to the American Dream?

The raw number of college men from privileged backgrounds is expected to grow by 11.5 percent (U.S. Department of Education). Simultaneously, the number of low-income and minority first-generation college male students is in free-fall. So, how to increase the percentage of males?

 Carefully.

 The path to gender parity is fraught with legal and politically sensitive matters.

Already watchdogs are claiming a new kind of discrimination toward female applicants. But this issue has been around a while, so proven strategies and tactics are available.

• Sports: Small colleges such as former women's Seton Hill University, Pa., have created football teams. The payoff is word-of-mouth. Men recruit other males to enroll.
   
• Male-oriented promotional materials : De-feminize everything from the graphics/color scheme to how that message is delivered. For instance, ditch the feminine layout, emphasize career issues vs. intellectual challenge, and use digital distribution tools, ranging from video games to male-student blogging. Yes, video games have product placements. High-school students and their parents surf blogs to get insider information about a specific college.
   
• Affordability: Several tactics ranging from direct financial aid to reducing the rate of tuition increases can effectively help attract and retain low-income and minority males (Jacqueline King's "Gender Equity in Higher Education").
   
• Support Systems : Tactics may include resurrecting the old-boy frat system, establishing special first-generation college organizations for males, and launching male-mentoring programs.
   
• One-sex schools and courses: Women's colleges were created to provide separate learning experiences in a male-dominated system. Right now, this could do the trick for keeping males on-track. As a form of niche marketing this could be profitable (Seth Godin's "small is the new big").
   
• Mars vs. Venus Brains: Recent brain research shows males learn differently than females (Michael Gurian's "Boys and Girls Learn Differently"). Revamp curriculum with fewer textbooks and lectures, more experiential assignments.
   
• Successful models: Thanks to out-of-the-box outreach, nursing programs have an excellent track record for increasing/retaining males.

Except faculty

In 2005, former Harvard President Larry Summers brought to national attention the issue of the low percentage of women on science faculties. Earlier still, the issue of male-dominated faculties had emerged as a business problem in higher education. A lot was and is at stake.

Jane Genova

Think about the ramifications. There are federal funding issues. There is competition within higher education and with private industry to recruit and retain top talent of either gender. There are discrimination and reverse discrimination lawsuits (male faculty vs. Northern Arizona University, for example). There are diversity issues and the image of higher education as a meritocracy.

Yet, progress has been slow throughout academia. It's been even slower in research-oriented universities and in typically male disciplines like science and engineering. Meanwhile, retaining tenured female faculty members is difficult as they move into business careers or full-time motherhood.

Last June, Harvard released a report, commissioned by Summers after the gender controversy. The report stated that in the natural sciences, 25 percent of those on the tenure track are females, compared to 22 percent the previous year. Not much gain. Overall, only 8 percent of tenured faculty in the department are women.

Where are all the women? Nationwide, women constitute about 20 percent of science and engineering faculty and few are in senior positions (National Bureau for Economic Research). Evelynn Hammonds, Senior Vice Provost for Faculty Development and Diversity assisted with the study. She observed, "Harvard is at the beginning of a very long journey."

Progress is glacial because the matter touches just about every third rail in higher education, impacting women's issues and the balance of personal and work life. Research by organizations such as Princeton University Women's Center and individuals like Donna Nelson at the University of Oklahoma has shone light on numerous factors which make it unattractive or difficult for women to pursue academic careers.

• Academic careers demand long hours, narrow specializations and solitary working conditions, while often providing lower pay to women than men.
• The cost of child care, when available, is tough on an academic salary. At the Harvard Yard Child Care Center, the annual cost for an infant during the academic year was nearly $20,000, and a bit less for a toddler.
• Academic knowledge can change rapidly in technical and scientific fields, presenting real obstacles if women take off for family matters.
• More women report severe stress than men. (85 percent vs. 67 percent, University of Missouri-Columbia study). Isolation is often a problem, particularly for women of color.
• Growth of dual-career couples makes finding two suitable academic positions challenging.

There is good news. MIT, the University of Wisconsin and others have taken steps to address gender, and have stuck with them. They have recruited women and may even be retaining more of them. Formal intervention seems to produce results. Add to that a growing chorus of higher education critics who contend that academic operations are often emotionally dysfunctional and not cost-efficient. Macro changes may be inevitable.

Especially Leadership

The 2005-06 academic year wasn't kind to leaders in higher education, as presidents at Harvard, Case Western Reserve, and the Universities of Richmond and Maine resigned. Barely missing the bullet were presidents at Gallaudet University, Eastern Oregon, Indiana State and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Leadership in higher education has become tenuous, because few can embrace the status quo and survive. The load of urgent initiatives includes reforming undergraduate education, raising big money … and more. That's why there's so much talk about the so-called feminine/beta style of leadership.

Jane Genova

Beta leaders tend to seek cooperation/consensus instead of ruling top-down. They are high in emotional intelligence and having the right read on people. They respect intuition as much as facts. They create compelling narratives to make the desired results concrete and appealing. They are other-directed or organization-directed, not self-oriented. They are patient and persistent.

Corporate leaders like Steve Jobs can still be autocratic and succeed. But that conventional male approach may not produce good results in decentralized organizational structures such as higher education. Autonomous constituencies like tenured faculty, trustees and funding sources need to believe and buy in.

Ever since Margaret Hennig and Anne Jardim brought us "The Managerial Woman," there has been ongoing research on this topic. A 2003 analysis by Alice Eagly and Marloes van Engen of 45 studies of leadership in diverse organizations found that women tend on average to shun alpha male ways.

Meanwhile, the feminine approach isn't restricted to women. Many smart men also use it. In "Changing Minds," Howard Gardner chronicles how, against all odds, James O. Freedman was able to transform old-boy Dartmouth into an intellectual powerhouse using beta strategies. This time around, Harvard might search for a change agent more like Freedman.

Equally interesting - not all females do beta well. Eagly and Van Engen observed that when women feel insecure they may go alpha, big time. Moreover, because females tend to excel in emotional intelligence they may choose to be manipulative.

Today leadership styles may have to be continually fine-tuned, perhaps even through extreme makeovers. At Kraft Corporation, for example, Ann Fudge achieved success with a super feminine style. When Fudge moved to the rough-and-tumble world of Young & Rubicam Advertising, Business Week did a cover story asking: How will consensual warm and fuzzy play? It's didn't. Fudge couldn't pull off a turnaround.

How to adapt the right style for the right situation? Effective leaders like Bill Clinton, Margaret Thatcher and Lyndon Johnson knew when to mix alpha hard-line with the softer side of power. They probably learned this by studying what worked for other leaders. In higher education, there's plenty of diverse leadership to analyze.

All-Male Colleges?

Would more males be receiving undergraduate degrees if there were more all-male colleges? 

Jane Genova

Research indicates non-white, low-income males might. Middle-income and upper-middle income white males are attending college at about the same rate as females - 49 to 51 percent, while in the Ivies males still outnumber females (National Education Association).

Think tank Educator Sector recently tracked test scores and other kinds of academic material from 1971 to the present. It found that males aren't falling behind. In fact, their performance has improved, but women's performance is improving more than theirs.

But there is a growing push to restore all-male education or at least experiment with that model. Those encouraging this range from an educator at Providence College to the National Association for Single Sex Public Education to the U.S. Department of Education. The latter is even loosening the legal impediments such as Title IX. 

Of course, little of this is new. Way back in 1969, Patricia Sexton's The Feminized Male delivered the message that American schooling was over-accommodating females at the expense of males. As a result, early on some boys tuned out academic learning. More recently, that message has been focused specifically on first-generation college males. 

Here's what's new. Firstly, media attention has probably reached a tipping point. Gender issues have become, well, sexy. USA Today (3/28/06), described a New York public school class that made a "feeling chart" for Little Red Riding Hood. Men's magazine Details (11/05) covered the opportunities for males to learn to be men at Wabash College. 

Secondly, the right questions seemingly are being asked in the right way - that is, calmly and cautiously. The leading question is: Will the all-male college prove to be an effective and cost-efficient solution for making higher education accessible to non-privileged non-white males? Or will this be just another fad? After all, since the 1960s, co-education has been the standard in American higher education. Perhaps its customers like it that way. 

Perhaps other less radical approaches will be tried, by themselves or along with all-male colleges. 

Higher education might reach out to the blue-collar men being displaced from those good-paying jobs in declining industries (think auto and airlines). Bringing them to class would quickly restore gender parity. Like the older males who attend college on the GI Bill, they may blow away what's now over-feminized.

Conversational Style

In 1994, linguist Deborah Tannen in Talking From 9 To 5, explained - and defended - how women speak in the work place. Today, that feminine conversational style has become standard in many professional environments, including academia.

Jane Genova

That style is usually described as indirect, inclusive, self-effacing, diplomatic or sensitive to others' feelings, open in sharing personal information, and devoid of taboo topics. This feminine way of communicating has been called everything from "politically correct" to "institutional/corporate-speak" to Orwellian.

How did this feminine conversational style come to dominate professional life? Fear of litigation is one reason. Laws and lawsuits abound in the workplace regarding sexual harassment, racial discrimination, employee abuse, and coercion to commit unethical or illegal acts.

Unlike the more direct, colorful male approach, the female style is pre-filtered of content that might land higher education in lawsuits. That's why it makes news if a female superior is sued for complimenting a subordinate on his/her sexual attributes.

In addition, America has become sensitive to image or public relations issues, and who isn't media-savvy today? Disgruntled employees or resentful higher-ups can easily leak anything. Clearly, it hurts an organization's image when a book such as Nina Munk's Fools Rush In comes out and quotes leaders using foul, bullying language. Is there such an entity as a private, confidential conversation? Forget that. Be safe: Talk like a woman.

Tannen points out, research and experience show that the other-centric feminine style, gets things accomplished in organizations. Tasks seem to get done efficiently and with less emotional fallout when participation is requested, not commanded. "John, do you think you'll have this report for the group before our meeting tomorrow?"

Encouragement and suggestions for course correction seem to be more effective than criticism and mandates. It's common sense to couch everyday conversations so that everyone feels respected, valued and included. This is antithetical to the way power used to be acquired in organizations - with mandates, threats and humiliation.

The feminine style however does have critics. In his essay "Seriously, the Joke Is Dead," Warren St. John blames the "feminization of American culture" for not only killing off humor but also making "male camaraderie" impossible at work. Work isn't as much fun as it used to be, and not just for males.

Far more importantly, institutional or corporate-speak has been attacked because it prevents connection with customers. As we all know: A global technologically driven marketplace has made the struggle for getting and retaining customers Darwinian. For that reason, social media experts (Robert Scoble and Shel Israel in Naked Conversations) are re-training organizations to communicate in an open, friendly, interactive manner. Think blogs.

Language styles are always morphing. This feminine style will probably evolve into a communications hybrid that is sensitive to issues of law, sex, race and ethnic diversity. Yet, it's flexible. Having fun and easily connecting with customers may be possible again.

Jane Genova, writer and marketing communications consultant, may also be found blogging.