In fall 2020, the Undergraduate Finance Board had seven female and four male students on their board. Today, it only has two female members.
In contrast, multiple Class Coordinating Boards have been led by women in recent years. But Sonia Sachar ’20, 2019 CCB co-president, said that CCB has historically been “a little bit less diverse” due to its relationship with Greek life.
To delve into the current and past gender breakdowns of student government at Brown, The Herald examined past coverage and emails from current and former Student Government Association leadership and talked to members of all three SGA branches — UFB, CCB and the Undergraduate Council of Students.
UFB: Searching for gender diversity
As UCS chair of student activities who also sits on UFB, Will Borges ’24 is the only current member of UFB who served on the 2020-21 board other than current Chair Amienne Spencer-Blume ’23 — the first female chair since the 2018-19 academic year.
Spencer-Blume declined a request for comment.
The 2020-21 board was “very cool to be a part of,” Borges said adding that “there were a lot of great conversations” over Zoom.
But many female members on the board that year did not run again, Borges said. Female membership in UFB drastically decreased from 2020-21 to 2021-22 — from 7 to 3 — and the number has decreased since.
Two of the board’s rising seniors — Gianna DeVincenzo ’22 and Claire Brown ’22 — both ran for re-election in 2021, with DeVincenzo elected as at-large representative and Brown as vice chair. The only other female member of UFB coming into fall 2021 was Spencer-Blume, an at-large representative and a junior at the time.
But a series of resignations and special elections brought the total number of women on UFB down to one by the spring.
“I don't think we (can) say that campus is not electing women,” said current UFB Vice Chair and Chair-elect Arjun Krishna Chopra ’25. “It really comes down to how do we ensure that women run for UFB.”
In the recent spring elections for the 2023-24 year, there were two female candidates out of 17 for all UFB positions. The incoming board has one female member, Naomi LeDell ’26, who earned the most votes out of all elected at-large representatives, according to an SGA email. UFB will hold elections in the fall for first-year representatives.
In the 2021 vice chair special election, Spencer-Blume was the only female candidate. A majority of candidates were male in the at-large representative special election.
Chopra said he hopes UFB will work with “all affinity groups on campus to ensure that there is an adequate publicization of what UFB is,” he said. While Chopra and Ian Kim ’25 are both men, the pair will focus on “outreach to ensure gender diversity and … balance,” Chopra said.
Catherine Jia ’26 — a current first-year representative and UFB’s only other female member — said she first learned about UFB during the activities fair in fall 2022. “I really wanted to know what was happening on campus,” she said. “I knew I wanted to do more finance or business, so I thought this was a very collaborative way to get started on that.”
She added that her experience on the board has been “very inclusive.”
“It’s not a different experience because I’m a female,” she said, adding that no presenters have taken issue with the board’s gender breakdown — while noting that more gender diversity could add different perspectives.
Paige Richter ’24, finance chair for Women in Business, described the overall environment to be “non-intimidating” when she presented WiB’s budget, even though she did notice that the board consisted of mostly men. The fact that the chair was a woman made UFB seem less male-dominated, Richter added.
A diverse board would ensure that “we are not ignoring due to unconscious bias or conscious bias people of certain groups,” Chopra said. “That matters beyond just gender and race.”
Next year, three of six SGA leadership members will be women, Borges noted.
In this spring’s elections, an amendment was passed allowing UFB to fill new positions by appointment. “Hopefully … we’re gonna be able to fill these administrative positions with an equal representation of men and women,” Chopra said.
Jia, who did not run in the recent spring elections, said that she plans to run in the internal election. “I wanted some more diverse experiences on UFB,” she said.
CCB: “Anyone is able to thrive”
When Carina Sandoval ’23, current CCB senior co-president, joined the first-year board in 2019, the senior co-presidents were two women of color: Sachar and Liana Lum ’20 MD’24.
“I just really thought that was amazing,” Sandoval said.
Women of color have consistently led CCB’s senior classes over the last four years: Ella Joshi ’21 in 2020-21, Bree Zhang ’22 and Mel Cui ’22 for 2021-22 and Sally Zhang ’23 and Sandoval this year. Next year, one of two senior co-presidents, Becca Erdenbulgen ’24, is a woman of color.
When Sachar joined the board in 2016, she was among a group of CCB members promoting diversity and inclusion within the organization.
During Sachar’s first year, CCB had roughly six women of color across the 24 positions, she said. Sachar tied that dynamic to CCB’s historic relationship to Greek life on campus, as predominantly white students affiliated with fraternities and sororities funneled “the same cohort of friends” to apply for board positions, she said.
According to Drashti Brahmbhatt ’19, when she was first-year board president in 2015, her board noticed that the three other class years’ boards were “not as representative of the larger student body as” theirs.
“We learned … (about) a long-standing trend in class board history of mainly electing white, cisgender men,” Brahmbhatt wrote in a message to The Herald. Her board also “began to flag additional issues such as how our general body meetings (run), how our events are not as inclusive as they should be and our larger relationship with Providence.”
In 2016, Sachar remembered watching Brahmbhatt having to “go out of her way to make a point” because internal conversations were dominated by male upperclassmen.
That fall, the sophomore class board — headed by Brahmbhatt and consisting of six members — spearheaded the creation of a diversity, equity and inclusion committee across years of CCB aimed at creating a “more safe and inclusive space for all identities,” she said.
In its first meetings, the committee “began to discover the root causes” of why elected boards were not diverse and “organized educational training” for all CCB members, Brahmbhatt said.
According to Sachar, the committee also aimed to foster inclusivity and accessibility in CCB events, advocating for physical accommodations as well as equitable marketing strategies.
During her time, CCB shifted toward more diverse events focused on students who may not have been included previously and “stress relief, self-improvement and self-help.”
When Sachar became senior co-president of CCB in 2019, 60% of the elected board consisted of women.
According to Sandoval, CCB recently began an internal practice of surveying members about their comfort level in dealing with certain situations to better distribute responsibilities. Some of these situations included interacting with an intoxicated person or with the Providence Police Department, “which (is) male-dominated.”
CCB continues to be a place where “anyone is able to thrive,” Sandoval added.
UCS: Considering representation
While elected UCS positions have been balanced in gender in recent years, only six members of the current UCS executive board are women out of 19 positions.
“I think (gender breakdown in UCS) has more to do with who is encouraged to run and to be in positions of power. And historically, that is generally men,” said Sarah Frank ’25, UCS vice president-elect.
In the most recent election, four of the 11 candidates were women.
When UCS President-elect and current Vice President Mina Sarmas ’24 decided to run for last year’s spring elections, she said she had considered running for chair of campus life instead of vice president.
“It’s just an empowerment thing, a confidence thing — I feel like if I didn’t have any experience, I wouldn’t have the confidence to run for a position,” she said.
Next year, UCS will have a female president and vice president — Sarmas and Frank — for the first time since the 2018-19 academic year.
“It takes a woman to understand what kind of needs that half the student population has on campus,” SGA Elections Chair Joon Nam ’23 noted.
When the UCS Campus Life Committee began work on menstrual product initiatives, Sarmas was chair of the committee, and two other male students were members — Christopher Vanderpool ’24 and Liam O’Connor ’24.
“They were great,” Sarmas said. “But I think after a certain point … there wasn’t much that they could contribute to the conversation.”
Vanderpool said that committee members took the lead on projects they were passionate about but helped each other as necessary. O’Connor declined to comment.
While she said the breakdown is not intentional, Sarmas noted that “the people that I usually work closest with usually end up being women.”
Kathy Wang is the senior editor of community of The Brown Daily Herald's 134th Editorial Board. She previously covered student government and international student life as a University News editor. When she's not at The Herald, you can find her watching cooking videos or writing creative nonfiction.
