Board member Doris Drucker is honored with a $1 million scholarship program for women leaders

Drucker Institute board member Doris Drucker has been honored with the launch of a new scholarship program in her name, the Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management at Claremont Graduate University has announced.

The program, funded through a $1 million gift from successful Japanese entrepreneur Masatoshi Ito, will reward talented and exceptional women seeking to enter careers in management and leadership.

Ito’s lead gift will allow a first class of five Doris Drucker Fellows to be awarded for the entering class of MBA students for fall 2008, and will be set up as an endowment to continue to assist the future female leaders of the management world.

The gift also marks the start of a campaign to fundraise from other sources to expand the number of Doris Drucker Fellows in future years. The Doris Drucker Fellowship is intended to provide scholarship assistance for the most deserving women candidates who apply to the Drucker School. A special selection committee will evaluate prospective Doris Drucker Fellows and will make the final award decisions.

“Mr. Ito’s gracious, unsolicited offer to endow these fellowships in my name is deeply touching,” said Drucker. “I am grateful for his generosity and eager to greet at the Drucker School a new generation of women leaders that society so desperately needs.”

Doris Drucker was married to famed management scholar and social philosopher Peter Drucker for 68 years. A native of Germany, she met Peter while a graduate student in England, where they had both fled to avoid the rise of fascism. They married in 1937 in London, and raised four children. As a family, they moved to Claremont, California in 1971, when Peter became a professor at Claremont Graduate University, where the graduate school of management was named in his honor.

Doris received her master’s in physics from Fairleigh Dickinson University in 1963 and a recipient of an honorary degree from CGU. She is the author of an autobiography, entitled, Invent Radium or I Will Pull Your Hair, and is a scientific inventor. Ten years ago, Doris started an enterprise, RSQ Co. to produce and market her patented invention of an electronic device which lets people see how loud they speak-useful for public speakers and performers and for speech pathologists training speech-disabled individuals to regain speech at normal levels.

At age 96, she leads a vigorous life, lecturing on a wide variety of topics, regularly playing tennis and lifting weights, climbing mountains, and traveling extensively around the world, especially with her children and grandchildren.