on the lack of women on university and hospital boards in the Philadelphia region.
“We urged the eds and meds to narrow the gender gap by setting an initial goal of at least 30% women trustees,” Carolyn Adams, co-chair of the initiative and former dean of Temple University’s College of Liberal Arts, said in a statement. “We now call on these institutions to close the gender and racial gaps within the next three years, so they have boards that are representative of the gender and racial diversity of our region’s population.
Board members of color occupy 24% of seats on college boards and 19% on health-care boards, up from 13% in each category in 2019. But the report also noted that less than one-quarter of the boards are chaired by women, and only one, Gwynedd Mercy University, has a woman of color. And only two boards are chaired by men of color, one of them at Lincoln, a historically Black university.
Kara Wentworth, executive director of La Salle’s nonprofit center, noted that La Salle for the first time in its history has a female chair of the board of trustees, Ellen E. Reilly,who is head of health-care and life sciences at WHOOP, a Boston-based company that monitors fitness through wearable technology. But she wasn’t included in La Salle’s numbers because she didn’t get the position until July 1 after the study had closed.