Most male administrators and senior faculty still assume that the wife will have the primary responsibility for child-rearing. While for most couples this is still the arrangement, this typecasting has led to many policy decisions which inhibit or prevent women and men from rearranging traditional family roles.

An employment policy which allows a woman but not a man to reassume her old job after an extended childrearing leave of absence (not childbirth) would seem to discriminate against men who would like to help rear his children, as well as against women who would like to shift some of the responsibility to their husband.

Many male administrators now state that women should be given such a leave. But the same administrators looked upon paternity leave as absurd. "But men can't breast-feed," Walter J. Leonard, assistant to the President and the University's chief affirmative action coordinator, said. "Sure, if any of our professors rapes a girl, we will insist that he help support the child," was the joking response of William L. Brice, vice-dean and equal employment officer at the Law School.

The stereotype of the woman as secretary is especially ingrained. "You need women around to balance the allmale atmosphere," one professor said when asked why he didn't hire male secretaries. He seemed rather taken back when one woman secretary asked him why he didn't just hire women professors. "We've done our best," he hastily added, looking rather uncomfortable.

Women accept the stereotype too. "Men can't type," a woman administrator automatically said when asked if she would hire a male receptionist to sit in the front office.

Several Harvard administrators claim that the segregation of women in clerical jobs is their own fault. "Men don't often apply for the jobs, one personnel officer said. "If they did, and were qualified, they would be hired." But one women who arranges job interviews in a large department in the faculty of arts and sciences said that she has noticed that professors are uncomfortable with the idea of having a male secretary. "One of the two men who interviewed with professors in my department came back and told me he had the distinct impression the professor would have preferred he hadn't come." She said that both men were well-qualified, but neither got a job.

Prejudging the demands of a job may hurt women and minorities as much as predetermination of an individual's capabilities according to sexual or racial stereotypes. It is more than coincidence that jobs traditionally held by women or minorities pay less and offer fewer opportunities for promotion than those usually held by men.

A secretary at Harvard often does responsible administrative work such as editing, researching, budgeting, and putting together complicated course materials. Many professors, lucky ones at least, would agree with one Business School professor's statement: "I don't have to worry about leaving for a day or so. My secretary knows as much about my course as I do. She makes half of my decisions for me."

Yet, while a man with a B.A. starting in a low-paying minor administrative position has many opportunities to move up within the ranks, a secretary with a B.A. has little chance to move into an administrative job, no matter how many responsible tasks she has mastered.

Stimulated by the affirmative action program, many academics have recently done studies which discount several of the myths about women. One of these studies showed that married women PhDs publish more than male PhDs. Another, done by the National Academy of the women doctorates have somewhat greater academic ability than their male counterparts.

About 90 per cent of women doctorates are in the labor force and 81 per cent of these women work full time; 79 per cent had not interrupted their careers in the past ten years. By contrast, only 69 per cent of men with doctorates work full time in their fields. The Department of Labor reports that men lose more time due to hernias than women do because of childbirth.

Due to cultural pressures, women do not go on to get high degrees as often as men. Yet the latest and most extensive study of sex discrimination, done by Helen Astin and Alan E. Bayer from the Council on Higher Education, shows that 17 per cent of the difference in rank and salary between men and women could only result from sex discrimination.

If equal employment opportunity is the goal of affirmative action program, it may be worthwhile to set goals and timetables for recruiting white men to fill jobs traditionally held by women or blacks. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission set a precedent this year in this area when it settled a case of sex discrimination brought against AT&T. The EEOC not only insisted that the phone company set goals for giving women management and line repair jobs, but also for making men switchboard operators, a once-respectable, starting clerical job which became a low-paying dead-end position when taken over by women