Women’s Summit gives insight

This past Saturday, five successful female leaders affiliated with Hopkins came to Homewood to share their wisdom, insight and advice with Hopkins’ female student body. Organized by the newly founded, eight-member undergraduate group Women’s Initiative for Social Equity (WISE), the event featured lawyer-turned-broadcast-journalist and NBC 10 Philadelphia news anchor Renee Chenault-Fattah as the keynote speaker. Chenault-Fattah, a 1979 Hopkins graduate, was followed by Mindy Farber (Class of ‘74), Joanne Leedom-Ackerman (Board of Trustees member) and Sarah Hemminger (BME PhD from Whiting) at the speaking podium. Before lunch, the 60 or so attendees were partnered with alumnae, faculty and WISE board members and given the opportunity to discuss issues faced by working women in a one-on-one conversation. WISE plans to host similar events moving forward, including a speaker series this fall and an informational meet-and-greet on March 31.

The Editorial Board applauds WISE, the five Hopkins-affiliated female leaders, the 60 student attendees and everyone else involved in this event for their participation, hard work and concern for social progress. The Editorial Board would remind the Hopkins community that it was but 44 brief years ago when female undergraduates were prohibited from enrolling at Hopkins. Comparing this brief timeline with how impressively women are thriving on campus today, it is clear that immense progress has been made in a very short period of time. Those heroic women who were able to succeed at Hopkins and beyond even in the ‘70s are remarkable for their bravery, drive, talent and willpower. When they returned this weekend, we have little doubt they were proud of the progress Hopkins has made since then.

We have even less doubt, however, that there remains an extremely long way to go. Women in this country face a greater array of disadvantages than we can enumerate in one editorial — to make no mention of the horrendous inequalities women face across the globe. Unfortunately, Hopkins itself is no exception to these troubling trends. At the student level, rape and sexual assault remain massive problems at college campuses in particular. The Board calls upon the University to give more than lip service to female equality, in the hope that when this year’s female graduates return to campus many years from now after rewarding leadership careers, they will have a more rapid pace of progress to celebrate.