Shortly after becoming president of Radcliffe in 1972, Matina S. Horner went to the Faculty Club to meet with a member of Harvard's main governing board. Although women traditionally had been led in through the back door of the club and served in a dining room apart from the men, Horner thought it time for a policy change.

"I finally decided that being ushered into the back room would not do," she says.

Horner claimed a seat in the main dining room and declined gentle invitations from the staff to follow custom and retreat to the back room. She says that the surprised staff allowed her to remain, thereby ending a Harvard tradition of segregation.

Dean of the School of Education Patricia A. Graham was startled by similar treatment in the late 1960s, when she visited Harvard for the first time. She entered through the back door and was led to a separate dining room. "I think they're better since then," says Graham, who later became the first female dean of a Harvard graduate school.

Women administrators interviewed last week say they do no think they have been discriminated against during their Harvard careers. But they add that Harvard still has a long way to go to meet its affirmative action goals and the University may not be moving fast enough.

"I think [the University's hiring of women is] heading in the right direction," says Dr. Eleanor G. 'Shore '51, associate dean for faculty affairs in the office of academic programs in the Medical School. She says that she believes President Bok, who appoints deans and other high level administrators, is committed to promoting women. "There is a wish from the top down that we move in that direction faster."

"At Harvard the personnel office is supposed to be a service, but the schools themselves and the person who does the hiring has an awful lot of autonomy," says Jacqueline O'Neill, associate vice president for state and community affairs. "It's difficult to say if there have been deliberate strategies. It's not like the president issues an edict that the next three middle managers you hire must be women."

Moving Through the Ranks

Landmark appointments have been slow to arrive. Graham came to Harvard 14 years ago and later became the University's first female dean when she assumed the helm of the Ed School. Last fall, Sally H. Zeckhauser became the University's first woman vice president. Still, only a handful of Harvard's top posts are held by women.

According to the Office of Human Resources, 50 percent of the Harvard administration--including both senior posts and middle managers--is female. Yet, critics of the University charge that most women in the administration work at the bottom levels, as secretaries and lower-rung supervisors.

Women officials indicate that these middle managers have a good chance of moving up through the ranks of the Harvard administration as they have done themselves.

"I think it's only a matter of time until there are more women at the top echelons," says Zeckhauser, who was promoted from within, rising through Harvard Real Estate to the vice president for administration. Horner, too, followed the inside track when in 1972 she became the first Radcliffe president to come from inside the University.

Now that women have begun to reach the upper ranks of Harvard's administration, Horner says, their presence has contributed to what she calls a changing perception of women in the University.

In the late 1970s, she says, women at Harvard commonly found themselves stereotyped as less competent than their male counterparts. Horner describes being the only woman at an administrative discussion of a complicated mathematical concept. The man leading the meeting asked Horner to say when she understood the idea, as an indication to him that he was making himself clear. Horner says the man had assumed it would be difficult for a woman to grasp the complicated concept.

But Horner says this kind of attitude has grown less prevalent during her tenure. "The presence of these women [in the administration] have challenged so many unfounded assumptions that existed," Horner says.