UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — In a nationally televised broadcast, Penn State President Neeli Bendapudi shared her thoughts about growing opportunities and continuing challenges for women leaders in higher education, and discussed the important role of Penn State and other top U.S. universities in preparing students for successful lives and careers.
“It’s great news on the one hand to see progress (in the number of women leaders of top universities), but certainly there’s hope that we can do so much better,” Bendapudi said in a March 7 interview on "CBS News Live" coinciding with National Women’s History Month. “Without question, when you look at enrollments, women far outpace men and have done so for a while. I’m hoping that we can build the career ladder so that more women actually do ascend to the highest levels of higher education.”
Watch the full interview at this link.
Penn State has been listed at No. 29 worldwide among the top higher education institutions led by women, according to a list released by London-based rankings organization Times Higher Education (THE) ahead of International Women’s Day on March 8. THE compiled the list based on its 2024 World University Rankings, which were released in October 2023; Penn State ranks at No. 122 globally.
According to THE, 50 of the top 200 institutions included in the World University Rankings are currently led by women. This is an increase from the 48 universities led by women last year and now amounts to a quarter of the top 200 universities in the world. In addition, there are 23 more women on the list than in 2015 when THE first started collecting the data, representing an 82% increase over nine years.
“I often think that for us to get more women presidents we need to make sure that women have successively more opportunities for leadership, and so looking for that ‘broken rung’ where it is that we’re losing a lot of women who are not getting to that next level, will be critical,” Bendapudi said.
Bendapudi also spoke to Penn State’s commitment to its more than 87,000 students and her focus as president, saying that the University has “a great responsibility to encourage all of our students to look beyond our differences to what unites us as humanity. We do this in a number of ways, focusing on the big, global challenges that we all face: food insecurity, climate change, cybersecurity, water — how are we going to tackle these together?
“I’m hoping that we all remember that institutions of higher education certainly are a path to a good living but they’re also supposed to be a path to a good life, to create solid citizens for our democracy,” Bendapudi added. “So it’s a constant focus for all of us and, fortunately, at least at Penn State, we have incredible faculty and staff who are very, very committed to making sure we do everything we can to launch our students to success.”