Welcome to The Broad Experience, the show about women, the workplace and success.

I'm Ashley Milne Tite. This time, making a traditionally female institution a bit more diverse.

We want to make sure that men who might be applying for our jobs understand that we are an equal opportunity employer,

and this is a very good place to be a man.

But it is still a women's college with feminist ideals, ideals that don't always triumph in the workplace.

Barnard really created such a strong sense of self-worth, but it left it up to us and up to me how to translate that sense of self-worth into actual behavior once you start working full-time.

Coming up, the merits of a single-sex college education and how that prepares women for work. Barnard College sits just across the street from Columbia University on Manhattan's Upper West Side.

It was founded in 1889 to give women access to the same kind of liberal arts education that was already available to men.

America used to have lots of women's colleges before higher education became mixed.

According to the Women's College Coalition, back in 1960, there were 230 women's colleges.

Today, there are just over 40.

But Barnard is in demand. Last year, it got more

than six times as many applications as it had places. Deborah Spar is the president of Barnard.

She's been at the helm since 2008. Before that, she was a professor at Harvard Business School.

You had this illustrious career at a famous institution, Harvard Business School, which we know is mostly male, and there's been a lot of coverage of that recently.

And then you came here to one of the most famous women's colleges in the U.S.

What was that like? What was that transition like? It must have felt different.

Well, I always joke that I would underwent a transition like? It must have felt different. Well, I always

joke that I would underwent a hormonal transformation when I moved from Harvard to Barnard.

And I say it jokingly, but I actually mean it quite seriously, that at least in my own personal

experience, being at a place that is run by and dominated by men is fundamentally different from being in a place that's run by and dominated by women.

And it's not better or worse, but it's quite different.

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