THE AFFIRMATIVE action proposal submitted to the Department of Health, Education and Welfare in early March does not represent Harvard's first attempt to meet Federal government requirements for a comprehensive non-discriminatory hiring plan.

Rather, it is the latest in a series of efforts to insure--to the government's satisfaction--the equal employment of women and minority group members on all the rungs of the ladder, in all the faculties and departments of the University.

But all of Harvard's proposals have failed. And despite the fact that Federally-funded institutions whose affirmative action proposals do not comply with government standards risk loss of Federal grants (about one-third of Harvard's total annual income), all indications are that the University's new and purportedly improved proposal is no more likely to win HEW approval than its forerunners.

Harvard's failure to complete an acceptable plan has created some tension between women currently employed by Harvard and the Administration. And despite the Administration's oft-voiced commitment to non-discriminatory hiring, and its assurances of the existence of comprehensive plans to implement the requisite recruitment, impatience, especially among women in the faculty ranks, has gradually turned to distrust.

This Spring, Harvard women employees finally united to work toward the goals which women had tried but failed to realize individually or in small groups. That organization, Women Employed at Harvard, will not limit its activities to lobbying for the recruitment of women. However, its formation clearly resulted from dissatisfaction with the University's nebulous stance on affirmative action.

Back in October, a small group of women faculty met with President Bok to protest what they termed the slow pace with which the University was proceeding in drawing up a new affirmative action proposal. But the women were not satisfied with the outcome of that meeting, so the following month they met with Radcliffe President Horner.

They also conferred with Walter J. Leonard, special assistant to President Bok and coordinator of the University's affirmative action program. Leonard assured them that he was maintaining constant touch with women in the University community to ascertain their ideas regarding affirmative action.

But the women faculty were disillusioned with the responses they received from the three administrators. So they garnered 33 signatures from women faculty members and administrators in a letter urging President Bok to give higher priority to the University's affirmative action program.

"It is urgent," the women wrote, "that the University clarify its position, good will, and its intent to undertake action to change the traditional pattern in which few women have been placed in tenured or advanced faculty rank."

"Women throughout the University feel they have not had the monetary and status rewards commensurate with those of their male colleagues, and have not been given sufficient opportunity for advancement," the letter said.

The women said that they did not advocate the appointment of women to positions for which they are not qualified, and they acknowledged the "difficulty of reversing old attitudes and changing traditional procedures, especially when the latter are informal and simply understood."

That letter was never answered to the satisfaction of the women. Realizing that in numbers there is strength, those women Corporation appointees embarked on a campaign to garner support from women employed at every level in the University. They extended their cause to salary-and-wage employees: office workers, kitchen workers and laboratory technicians.

After several organizational meetings, 100 women Corporation appointees and salary-and-wage employees gathered in Lowell Lecture Hall to endorse unanimously the founding of an organization of women employees.

In turn, that organization voted unanimously to recruit and hire a paid executive officer to coordinate the organization's activities and implement its objectives.

THE FORMATION of this organization sets a precedent at the University, whose history has not included the coordination of activities by Corporation appointees and salary-and-wage employees. No doubt the goals of each of these groups of working women overlap more than tangentially.