Assistant Teaching Professor of Rhetoric and Composition Miranda Egger has helped thousands of students learn to critically express themselves in her 20-plus years in CU Denver’s English Department, where she also directs the composition program. But last winter, she labored to write an opus of her own: an application letter detailing why she wanted to be part of CU Denver’s new Women’s Leadership Program.
Her early letter drafts leaned on conventional leadership case-making and left her dissatisfied. She scrapped them and leaned into a story she wanted to tell. “I grew up, in part, in a very traditional southern home and learned without question that a woman’s role was to be sweet, gentle, and above all else quiet,” she wrote. Her compounding CU Denver responsibilities and challenges helped her realize that “learned default to silence feels increasingly untenable.”
Though females outnumber males on CU Denver’s faculty, many women driving the university’s teaching and learning forward have their own version of Egger’s story. It’s a story the Women’s Leadership Program (WLP) aims to rewrite.
The Program
This WLP program, sponsored by the Office of Faculty Affairs (OFA), brings together women faculty and academic-serving staff for activities that inform their development as leaders, and that strengthen their identities as scholars who can relate to common challenges women in academia face. Over the course of an academic year, WLP participants engage (and hear from guest presenters) on topics that include navigating conflict resolution, enhancing self-reflection and self-awareness, establishing and expanding professional networks, and developing effective communication strategies.
Between sessions, WLP participants supplement group activities with one-on-one leadership interviews, readings, and independent projects that give them insight and perspective to inform their own career path. They also are developing CU-focused initiatives, which they will present this spring, that aim to advance women’s roles in higher education.
The WLP was developed and is led by School of Education & Human Development Professor Bryn Harris. She was inspired by a women’s leadership program she participated in at another institution, and CU Denver’s Office of Faculty Affairs encouraged her to propose a similar program here. “We know from research that women are less likely to persist in academia. For example, they’re less likely to go for full professor, and more likely to take on additional service responsibilities,” Harris said. “I’m interested in trying to remedy those inequities within academia, and I want to promote a sense of community and belonging among women here at CU Denver.”
After earning approval in 2023, the WLP was launched in the fall of 2024. It joins a mix of CU Denver leadership development opportunities organized by entities including the Office of Faculty Affairs and the Office of Human Resources.
How It Works
Associate Professor and 2024-25 cohort member Soumia Bardhan was drawn to WLP’s holistic approach to nurturing women, gender-diverse, and non-binary leaders in academia. She initially hoped the program would allow her substantive self-reflection, career mentorship, and enhancement of her leadership potential and of others with historically underserved identities.
And, she said, it has delivered on these expectations. “One of the big things it’s helped me with is networking,” said Bardhan, who is using WLP insights in her new role as interim director of International Studies. “I have learned so much about the ways things work in different colleges and departments, and it’s given me a more nuanced and comprehensive understanding of the entire CU System.”
WLP’s cross-unit mix of participants also creates intersections with other CU Denver work. For Bardhan, this includes celebrating introversion in higher education, which she advocates for as a ThinqStudio fellow. For Egger, it’s uplifting the identities of other non-tenure/tenure track educators that comprise the majority of CU Denver faculty.
Importantly, the WLP is helping its participants reconcile the dichotomy between being a leader and being a human, and is guiding them as they craft a recipe for leadership that’s all their own. “We see examples of leaders all around us … like Brené Brown, right?” Egger said. “She’s the quintessential person you can look to that leads with compassion, leads with empathy. I can say those are my goals. But what does that mean on a day-to-day basis? This program gave me the impetus, the freedom with which to find the connective tissue that I didn’t have beforehand.”