Non-Profit Eos Foundation is launching a campaign to press three Massachusetts universities to improve and increase women representation in leadership roles.
The foundation is roping in students, staff, faculty alumni and donors from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Tufts University and Boston University to petition their respective schools to improve the power gap and increase the presence of female leaders, according to The Greenfield Recorder.
“We want to give organizers a real opportunity to weigh in,” Foundation President Andrea Silbert said during a speaking event at the State House. “We’re eager to get this cluster of people on campuses going.”
Silbert further pressed the state government to address the lack of women representation in higher educational institutions and asked to replicate the model of California and New York, which has a higher percentage of women in the leading roles.
In September, the foundation released a report, Women’s Power Gap in Higher Education: Study and Rankings, to explain why women in Massachusetts remain underrepresented, even though they account for 51.5 percent of the population.
The study found that most of the Massachusetts colleges and universities have no gender balance, with 32 percent of institutions never having a female president, while 26 of them have less than 30 percent women on their board and 14 have none at all.
The foundation ranked Simmons, Smith and Emmanuel colleges at the top while Ivy League colleges including Harvard University fared poorly.
