Advocates for women's rights in the workforce often search for professions in which the gender ratio could reveal something about an underlying inequity.
But unequal opportunities for men and women aren't always the cause of such discrepancies.
Brown's Entrepreneurship Program is an example of this phenomenon - of the 24 members of the EP's Leadership Team, only eight are women.
Joshua Butler '04 and former Herald Executive Manager Joshua Miller '04, co-directors of the EP, both said they often think about how to recruit more women. Men looking to join the program are far easier to find than women, they said.
Butler said one possible reason for this disparity is that the program struggles with its image. "We have a stigma of 'big business,'" he said.
In an effort to incorporate more women into the program, the EP recruits female students from relevant classes and departments.
Still, the low level of female involvement is cause for concern, or at least close inspection, according to Butler. Eighty men in line to join the leadership board would be displaced by an equally qualified female applicant, he said.
Butler also speculated that the EP has fewer women than men on its Leadership Team because there is a women-only leadership program, the Organization of Women Leaders.
Though the group is on hiatus this semester because of a decline in membership, OWL co-president Kimberly Boortz '05 said that when active, the program had 15 to 20 active members.
According to Boortz, the organization was not exclusively for women, although few men were involved.
OWL began as a branch of the EP, then separated and was altered to include all aspects of women's leadership roles in society. The program originally was founded to illustrate that "there are opportunities for women to excel in business," Boortz said.
Because of its specific focus, OWL might attract female members who might otherwise participate in the EP, Butler said.
As a result, the participation of women in the EP is low because of ample opportunities for women in leadership programs, not in spite of them, according to Butler and Miller.
Brown's microcosm of entrepreneurial leadership, in which options for female students abound, is hardly representative of the business world. Women comprise less than 10 percent of Fortune 500 company boards. Throughout the 1990s, the number of women in senior management wavered between 3 and 5 percent, according to a study released in January by the Catalyst, a non-profit research organization that advocates for women in business.
Butler said the "(EP) program represents the real world" - one that is male-dominated, with the exception of these women-only groups.
At the same time, he said he realizes "one of the challenges is that we have to even out the inequalities that still exist in the system."
