Radcliffe is mounting a crusade to bring women to the faculty, but many say the new plan has little chance of...

The faculty appointment process still does not treat men and women equally, Skocpol says. When departments look for the best faculty, often members do not consider qualified women.

"For a long time, Harvard took the attitude that there weren't enough women of enough quality out there, and that attitude just isn't valid any more," she says. "There's the tendency to see actual or potential weaknesses in women scholars faster than in men.... A lot of young men have been appointed to the ec and government departments. It just doesn't happen as readily for women."

Georgi says women candidates may not always get equal treatment in the tenure process.

"It's so difficult for anyone to get through the process. If there's any tilt away from a woman or a minority it gets magnified in the process," he says. "That's the danger. Some of those very small subconscious tilts still exist."

Harvard's reliance on "blind letters" when making appointments poses a problem for women candidates, says Irene J. Winter, chair of the fine arts department.

In Harvard's tenure process, a department sends out "blind letters" with a list of possible candidates for a position. Experts at other schools respond with their comments about the scholars on the list.

"If you're asking the most established and most age-graded upward they're the people who are the most conservative and the least gender-mixed," Winter says.

"You're privileging their value system at the more conservative end of the age grade. You can do it in terms of quality and quality masks a huge amount of prejudice," she says.

Harvard's administration should do more to urge change at the departmental level, Skocpol says.

"I think that other universities have taken much more active steps at the administration level to encourage departments to come forward with women and minority candidates," she says. "When you're in a situation where Princeton is acting more aggressively than Harvard you can't say that it's something a conservative Ivy League institution can't do. And Princeton is doing more."

Even if the administration takes a stronger advocacy role, however, only the department members can ultimately decide who gets tenure. And some professors say that Harvard will change only when that sacrosanct process changes as well.

"I'd like to see a review of the standing procedures for making senior appointments," Winter says.

Radcliffe's Initiatives

The Radcliffe alumnae committee's report strongly criticizes Harvard's female tenure rates.