Although the number of women pursuing science has increased in the last few decades, students and faculty at Harvard say there is still room for greater change.

"Women have been making some progress, but not as much as one would like," says Dr. Carola Eisenberg, a member of the Committee on Women in Science and Engineering of the National Research Council of the Academy of Sciences.

Students say there is a lack of women in certain science classes.

"I went to go shop a chemistry class, and there were maybe a quarter women," Claire C. Tseng '98 says. "It's just one of those things you notice."

The Office of the Registrar reports that males outnumber females in almost every science and math concentration--including applied mathematics, astronomy and astrophysics, biochemical sciences, chemistry, chemistry and physics, computer science, physics and the engineering sciences.

Two concentrations, biology and earth and planetary sciences, have nearly the same number of female and male concentrators.

Only concentrations that combine science with the humanities, such as history and science and environmental science and public policy, boast of more women than men.

The number of women in the sciences decreases even more in graduate school and the work force, says Susan C. Arnott, program coordinator and director of Science Alliance, a first-year orientation program for females interested in science and mathematics.

"If you look at the women in science after undergraduate school, the numbers drop," Arnott says.

For example, the College's biology department has 247 male and 242 female concentrators, according to the Registrar's Office. The ratio of men to women is 50.5 to 49.5 percent, a difference of only I percent between the genders.

However, the gender gap grows bigger in graduate school.

The graduate school program in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology has 36 males and 26 females, a 17 percent difference between the number of male and female students, according to Margaret M. Hamilton, a graduate program coordinator.

But medical schools are closing this gap.

Ten years ago, the class composition of Harvard Medical School was 65.8 percent male and 34.2 percent female. This year's entering class is 54.8 percent male and 45.2 percent female.

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