Overt sexism is no longer the primary reason that few women hold faculty positions, fellows and faculty members say. Instead, they say, the problem stems from subtle forms of discrimination and the efforts at accommodation women feel they must make if they are to succeed in what some still consider a man's world.

"One of the difficulties is the expectation that now the rules have changed, the whole system will. But expectations haven't changed," Wilson says. "People don't have a sense of it in their bones. We don't call on women [as authorities on an issue]."

"The propaganda of the '50s, that normal women wouldn't want careers--much of that has vanished," says Olwen Hufton, professor of history and of women's studies.

Even when women overcome these obstacles, however, they are faced with greater demands than their male counterparts, Hufton says. "The fact that there are so few of them and that [universities] want them to be visible [means that] they're overstretched."

Helping women gain tenure has been a priority at the Bunting Institute for more than a decade. In 1976, the institute began a Non-Tenured Faculty Fellowship program--sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation--which set aside a number of fellowships specifically for women junior professors.

Although the program was a success--24 of the 36 fellows have received lifetime poistions and seven more are tenure-track--officials say they had to discontinue the program in 1986 because of financial reasons. According to McKinsey, the initial program was slated to run only 10 years and "Carnegie's priorities shifted."

The cessation of the non-tenured faculty program vividly demonstrates how dependent the work of the institute is on funding sources. Although the center last July received a $1.7 million grant from the Office of Naval Research to support the work of 45 women scientists over the next five years, Bunting officials say that there is a continued need for funding.

As a result of the growing interest of funding sources in political and social issues, institute officials have begun to set aside a larger number of fellowships for women interested in those fields.

The Peace Fellowship, given by an anonymous donor in 1983, supports a woman "actively involved in finding peaceful solutions to conflict or potential conflict among groups or nations." This year's peace fellow, Dessima Williams, former Granadian ambassador to the Organization of American States, is working on a project addressing U.S.-Caribbean relations.

Kip Tiernan, a Radcliffe visitor-in-residence who is working on a project about homeless shelters, says women could be doing more work in "the whole area of social ethics." Although women are often left out of public policy planning, they often end up being victims of bad policies, she says.

In order to gain a different perspective to the study of these social issues, an increased effort should be made to bring more working class and minority women to the institute, several fellows say. Such a step, they say, would also lead to added faculty diversity in universities around the country.

"Of the triple agenda of race, class and gender, the Bunting Institute touches gender. It has not yet responded to the necessity of transforming the class and racial [makeup] of academics," Williams says. "This could be a timely moment to make that transition."

Wilson says she does not think the institute is socio-economically elitist, but she too agrees that it "must look to people of all nations and socioeconomic levels."

Ladd, a former associate executive director of Oxfam America--an organization that supports self-help projects in developing nations, says she hopes to bring more minorities and women from the Third World to the institute.

"The moment in history has come for the Bunting Institute to increase its contribution to the advancement of the intellectual projects and pursuits of Third World women--Asian, African and Latin American women," Ladd says.